....and so it begins.
Sunday night everyone on the trip met for the first time.
Sam is our tour guide, he is from Chang Mai and has worked for intrepid for 5 years, Amy is 23 and from London, Evelyn is 21 and from Switzerland, Anita is 34 and from New York, Emma is 29 and from Australia, Peter is 50 and from Australia and there is a couple called Ben and Sarah from Atlanta who are 30 and 27, although Ben was originally from Switzerland as well.
Everyone is very excited about the tour and no has ever been to Thailand before.
After drinks and a meal that first evening it seems like everyone is going to get on well, we nearly all went to see a ping pong show together but chickened out at the eleventh hour.
On Monday morning we went for a cruise on a long boat on the river Chao Phraoa and saw some of the flooding, but the houses were built right on the edge and 2 inches extra of water would have flooded them, we fed some fish outside a temple, they were huge, but no one is allowed to go fishing there and therefore the fish are protected and very well fed by tourists.
Dotted all along the bank are various temples, shanty towns, luxury houses, shops and the new hospital, but the place we were heading was to the temple with the reclining Buddha. He is a whopping 47 metres long and holds the record of being the longest in Thailand. They were reroofing the temple and you could make a donation and “buy” a tile and write a wish on it, and then when the tile is used it will be there until the next time the roof needs redoing.
There is evidence of recycling in Thailand before the word had even been thought of. A lot of the monuments are made of broken china like mosaic, which were shipped over from the far east (proberly China!) and the empty trade ships were filled with limestone for ballast and these were carved into statues, waste not, want not!
The temple where reclining Buddha is housed has the most amazing hand painted wallpaper, not repeating patterns and telling stories.
On the way back to the hotel to get our bags the taxi driver tried the pull a fast one, but i was ready for him, haha! The fare was 50 baht and I had a 100 note ready to give him, expecting change obviously, but he looked at me with a pathetic smile and said “ah madame, no change no change”, “Oh no worries” says I, rummaging in my purse, “I have 50 here” that wiped the smile off his face.
Next we headed to the bus station to get a ride to Kanchanaburi, home of the infamous Bridge over the river Kwai. The bus station is huge and true to form full of market stores, it’s more like a shopping mall than a bus station, the bus was running late so we sat, surrounded by rucksacks and suitcases, in sweltering heat until it eventually arrived 40 minutes late.
Sam is a very good guide, and managed to work around the changes caused by the delay without any bother. The original plan was to get rickshaws from Kanchanaburi station to the guest house, then go see the War Cemetary and then the bridge, but as we were so late (the bus got later as the journey went on) we stopped on route to the hotel, hired push bikes, and cycled to the bridge.
It was weird to see the bridge, with all the lovely landscaped gardens, shops, pretty lights and quaint station, knowing the death toll that had gone into building it.
After dinner that evening, (blue rice and morning glory) we decided to get a few beers and sit in the guesthouse garden, so we all jumped on the bikes again and headed into town (about 5 mins away) to the local 7-11, the convenience store of choice in Thailand.
Sitting around the table we all agreed that it seemed like we had been there for ages and it was hard to believe that was only our first full day, and we still had two weeks left.
