Kanchanaburi was the only place I had really read about and knew anything about before I arrived in Thailand. It was all so rushed sorting things out, and obviously other things on my mind at the time, that I just hadn't really done my research. I figured I could do it out there. Which to be fair I did. This blog is proving so long to write that I'm going to write it as the days seperatly, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, since they were both very long days. I don't want to over-flow people with information!
So we were told that we could leave early on Friday, and we left just after lunch. Taken to the coach station near the village. Hardly a station really. Picture a double duel carriageway with cars travelling motor way speeds. The coach station is simply one of the bridges going over this massively dangerous road (a road I had seen multiple bike crashes on). So there are five lanes in each direction. From the edge of the road the first two, slightly slower then the rest, is where the minivans will stop to pick us up. After the two lanes there is a divider, giving us the remaining three lanes of the single direction. Here the cars don't slow down and it's basically like a motor way. This is where the coaches stop. Once the coach stops you run across the first two lanes, hop the divider, with all your bags and suitcases, and get onto the coach. Health and saftey eat your heart out!
We got a coach to somewhere we had never heard of. My guess was that it was somewhere about half way between Saraburi and Kanchanaburi (obviously), since we were getting a change over. We got there, and I didn't recognise it. We spent about an hour or so looking for the right coach. We kept getting sent to the minivan lot. But we wanted a coach, which would be cheaper. Eventually we found out the coach was more expensive then the minivan, so went to get the minivan.
Minivans are a blog in themselves. I'll be brief. Standard, just like you see here, 9 or so seats, reasonably comfortable and air conditioned. They will, with enough warning, drop you off at a stop at your choice. I don't mean, oh the coach station please, I mean, this specific hotel please. Very cool. We were the only two people in the minivan when it left, but it picked more people up along the way. It didn't get full though. I remember reading that these could get very uncomfortable when busy. I was thinking "not as bad as a coach, there were people standing on the two coaches I'd gotten before!" I will later be proved wrong on this. But that is another storey. The driver was watching a DVD while driving too, as will most of the minivan drivers I will get in the future.
We thought we were being dropped off at the right place. We weren't. They dropped us miles from our guest house. It would have been closer and easier to get off at the coach station instead of staying on. So various cabs and tut tuts offered us a lift up for a couple of quid and we said 'no, to much'. After walking in the right direction for maybe half an hour they dropped the price after a bit more haggling, knocked maybe 30/40p off. In the grand scheme of things that was so pathetic really, back home in that half an hour I could have earned more than ten times the amount we just 'saved'. But we got the tut tut to the guest house, which seemed to be much further away then we first thought. We drove past a lot of western style bars, clubs and other venues that actually looked pretty tacky and awful. I wanted to come here for the charm of a smallish Thai city/town with museums and various tours. I had an imagine in my mind of what this play would be like. I didn't think, stupidly, that it would be like this. I was very disappointed and wondered if this was all this place had to offer.
Nisa (or Nita... spelling and pronunciation was different and now I can't remember which was which) guesthouse. It was a floating guesthouse on the river Kwai. It was beautiful. We walked into the main 'room' and waited for someone to show us our rooms. There was a lot of wrangling of which rooms we had booked and now wanted if they were free. I spent an extra 50p a night (splashing out big time) to get a room with an en suite bathroom, instead of having to walk the plank across the river to the shore where the shared bathrooms where, outside with the bugs and the bats and chance of falling down the slope into the river. In the end it was worth it. My companion on the other hand, splashed out dearly on a room with a hot shower and air-con, paying something like three or four times a night more than me. In my opinion, not worth it.
We decided to stay in the guest house instead of trying to find a 'decent' bar. The guy who ran it was really chatty and very nice. I was really hungry and they did beers there, so win win. I ordered some sweet and sour style dish. It was amazing, incredibly well cooked and flavoured. We got some drinks on and talked with the manager and then a French girl who arrived. We also book our trek for the next day. More on that in the next post.
We would be getting up early for this trek, so I went to bed fairly early after just two Chang's. It had been a long day of travelling and it was going to be a very, very long day tomorrow. I got my stuff prepared that night. Bag packed with spare cloths, no towel, even though I was going to be swimming, and my camera's batteries all on charge and ready for the off! I turned the lights off and dozzed of to sleep with a mixture of the sounds of the gentle waves and the feel of my room gently moving side to side and a little up and a little down, and Mark Steel (at this point, rediscovering the legendary old Mark Steel lectures and solutions and revolutions that I hadn't listened to in years).
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