Kanchanaburi

This is the name of a city and province near the Thai-Myanmar (Burma) border. The province has jungle mountains (ok, more like hills, but mountains for Thailand), a very nice town, and a famous national park. The highlight of the national park is a gorgeous seven stage waterfall. But I digress, let me start at the beginning…

We did not have any school on Friday because it was the Queen’s Birthday, which is also the day that the Thai people celebrate Mother’s Day. I sent my mother a nice email (if I don’t say so myself!) that describes the culture’s practice of giving a white flower garland to their mother’s on the special day. Earlier that week, some of my students asked what mother’s day was like in America: I described the importance of letting mother’s sleep in, then making them breakfast, and then letting them relax as much as possible!

My American friend, Nick, whom I’d met in Phuket for teacher training, came down to my town on Friday. Saturday morning, he and I met with my Thai friends, Thanawat and Amonrat, and drove with them up to Kanchanaburi province. The drive totaled about 4 hours, including about an hour of negotiating the famous Bangkok traffic.

The first sight to see is the “Death Railway,” which stretches across the River Kwai. I wish we did more investigation as to how it got its name...From there, we drove another 30 minutes to get into the national park. Some of my other English teacher friends were in the park as well, but they did not have use of a vehicle. Their trip from the town to the park took 2 hours by bus, so I was very happy to have my Thai friend’s with us when I heard about their long bus ride just to go what took us 30 minutes!

We spent some time taking pictures of the jungle covered hills as well as a large, scenic dam sight. This was where we paused to rest and gather some information from the tourist center. We briefly contemplated camping in the park, decided against it, and then drove back down the hills. Halfway down, we pulled over to swim in the River Kwai.

Back in the town, we had dinner with some of my English teacher friends then checked into the River Kwai Mansion. It was more of an apartment complex than a Mansion, but I was there on vacation and not to correct the mistaken translations to English, and the rooms were halfway decent. The next morning, we had Massaman curry, which was recently rated by CNN as the #1 food in the world. See here for the top 50 foods.

We returned to the national park and enjoyed a two hour hike up the seven stages of the waterfall. Each stage was a small waterfall drop-off that was spaced out by about 10 or 15 minutes hike before the next stage. The scenery was breath-taking. A dense, lush jungle with bird sounds, occasional monkey sightings, pretty water and sculpture-esque waterfalls. Another benefit: the majority of tourists where Thais enjoying the holiday. It’s nice not to see the country being enjoyed by just the white folk!

We swam and slid down a smooth boulder slide at stage number five, then had a “fish” foot massage at stage number six. What is a fish foot massage, you ask? Simply stick your feet in the water and find out! There is an interesting variety of fish that will come up to your feet and eat off the dead skin cells! Sounds gross and, ok, it is pretty gross. They bite only enough to take the top layer and do not ever break the skin to draw blood. It’s an all-natural exfoliation. And a very tingly one too boot! The massage is actually so popular that many spas in Bangkok have foot tank baths full of the fish and charge about six U.S. dollars for the service. Mine was free!

After hiking back down, we loaded into the car again and drove back to Samutsakhon. The drive, both there and back, consisted of jamming American pop music, discussing American rock music we didn’t like, and then swapping English words and sentence usage lessons for the same in Thai with our Thai friends. We all agreed that the road trip experience was as fun as the time in the park, but probably not as pretty after four hours sitting together in a little car!