Wednesday 17th April 2019 - Take me back to Cha Am, man!

It's always funny hearing someone talking about how they want to go back to the little town they're from 'cos they don't like being "in the big smoke".
Well that's what we felt like today. We're just a couple of hicks from good ol' Cha Am 🤣

The bed we slept on last night was incredibly good and we got a solid 9-10 hours rest, which is almost unheard of for us both. We went down to the dining room for breakfast at ~08:30 and were met by the nicest crew. The total opposite to the surly unhelpful reception staff.

This is the young lady that made our breakfast more pleasant that it would otherwise have been.

A real sweetheart 

And this is what she made for us to say thank you for being nice to her. 

I think some of the people that stay there, mainly from the "new money economies" to the west and north of Thailand can be quite rude and don't treat the staff with any respect.

Although the kitchen and it's wait staff were very nice the place really needed a good clean. 

I think the windows had last had a good clean around the turn of the century.

This is the sign on the door to the bathroom in our room.

I think they were exaggerating as to how much force is required to open the door. 

These are random pics taken along the way home to Cha Am 

Out friend Felicia asked us to take pics of motorbikes carrying odd loads but that's not really done here in Thailand, that we've seen, It seems to be more of a thing in Vietnam.

This guy with his assortment of plastic bags all over the bike, each carrying a little bit of something, did look rather odd and that dog staring at the bike made it picture worthy.

I've commented a couple of times in this blog about how the Thai drive and ride and their road toll. As we neared Cha Am I saw this girl just ahead of us doing ~90kph

We got up next to her and she was clutching her mobile phone with her right hand. 

If you're a bike rider you will understand how difficult that would make riding and controlling the bike. Also, I know that the locals always look far younger than they are, but even taking that into account I'm thinking this young girl was way way too young to lose her life because of not wearing a helmet, and the majority of road fatalities here are due that exact reason.

It's pretty hard to enforce the helmet laws, which do exist, when the law enforcement officer put their helmets on just for show. This police officer, although wearing his helmet, had not buckled up his chin strap.

We got home around midday and settled in to our normal Wednesday routine, Tis worked online and I worked on my blog and photos. Being a Wednesday we looked forward to going to the night market, especially as Lee was here. 

We walked up at ~6pm and found it surprisingly quiet. We're not sure why it was as quiet as it was but we grateful nonetheless. It was great not to have to push through a hot sweaty mass of human bodies to get to anything and everything. 

Cockroaches

Coconut worms 

Both were quite nice but the experience is as overrated as the perceived "gross-ness" 

No they don't taste like chicken but they are a little, and I stress "little", crunchy with a nutty taste.

Until they come down in cost, which is currently, buy my very rough estimate ~AUD 20/kg, we may as well keep eating chicken or pork.

Little pork dim sum

Tiz, enjoying her dim sum

This is our third week in a row that we've been to the market and tonight it had 25% of the usual crowd, which made it 250% more enjoyable to get around and see things.

Well, that's it for today. 

Tomorrow life is back to normal, in the sleepy hollow we have come to love called Cha Am.

Thanks for dropping in and we hope to see you tomorrow.

Tuesday 16th April 2019 - Tour to the River Kwae

I'll get the most important thing we learnt today out there, before we go any further.
Kwai ( "kw-ai" or "kw-ay" as it sounds in Thai when we non-Thai pronounce it) can mean one of two thing -
1- water buffalo or 2 - mens testicles.
Kwae, (which sounds like "kwa-eh") as it should be spelt to reflect the the way the Thais say it, refers to the river we are going to see.

We got up at 5:00am to be ready at 6:00am which was the pick up time. The bed was rock hard which din't make for a good nights sleep anyway and getting up so early made it feel even more like the day was going to be a hard one. But, off we went, first in a small 12 seater bus and then onto a 40 seater.
The big bus was nowhere near full and all our fellow passengers were English speakers - A young
Scottish couple, a young English couple, a retired scaffolder from London and a young American girl that lived in Chennai and worked for the American military. All really nice folk.

This is the rough map of where we went but the pics that will follow tell the story much better.

It was about 380kms round trip with bus, boat, train and Grab.

All done in ~11 hours.

I read the article on the left as we waited for our first pickup in the morning.

If you click on the picture in this blog it should become larger and legible.

Tiz and I on the very roomy bus

First stop, about an hour north west of Bangkok

All the following were taken at the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery

Lots of Dutch soldiers as well as British and Australians.

So many young men, in their early 20's lost their lives.

The large blue dot shows where the following pictures were taken.

It's the Jeath War Museum.

This is actually the Buddhist Temple in Kanchanaburi

A map not to scale ,with information, of the railway that took so many lives to build

More information

Parts and displays of the museum, both inside and out.

Much of it was in "no picture" zones.

This was a temple nearby the museum

Tiz, with her Macey bag, in the grounds of the museum waiting to get on the boat 

that would take us to the bridge.

This is a mid 60's Fiat 1500, which I spotted off in the distance.

It had the Deus logo on the guard, which me made laugh.

It's hard to see in this pic but it call well have been a bit of a "rat rod". 

Regardless of what it was, it showed how up to speed the Thais are of contemporary fashions, be it in clothing or bikes or cars or anything and how they will appropriate it in an instant.

This is the engine of the boat we took to the bridge. It is significant because it is a small naturally aspirated four cylinder and almost everything we have seen on the water has had big turboed intercooled six cylinder motors. I guess we all want to go faster, just because.

That lil' 4 cylinder still poked along very smartly!

Oh yes, there's money, and a sense of humour, in Thailand. 

Take a good look at the boats in this picture.

Off in the background there was a huge very noisy wedding party, 

which could be both seen and heard from the bridge.

The locals know how to, and do, party hard, often, 

Tiz, with Macey bag, wandering around the market waiting for the train.

Here comes the train

Tickets for the train

Handsome guy with Songkran face adornment, put on by a local policewoman 

On the train with our snacks and certificate, which is better seen below.

Below are the crops we saw on our train journey 

They included sugar cane, taro, corn, pineapple and other crops we couldn't figure out

Not an uncommon site, 75 years after it was left there

Wang Pho was the end of the train journey

There goes the very long train we were on, down to Satun, just before Malaysia

I've included this picture as one of the Senior Delinquents, a group of motorcyclist that come from Phillip Island, was a train driver and I'd say he would be interested in seeing this train.

The great little restaurant we stopped at for lunch

Buffet style 

Fried chicken and rice noodles.

Some of the people in our tour group

Back on the bus, on the way back to Bangkok with our box of snacks 

We had booked the night at a hotel called The Xtreme Hotel, on the outskirts of Bangkok, and after checking in and having a short break we headed out for dinner.

We wandered about for a while, even sitting down at one restaurant that sadly went out of their way to ignore us. We left and thankfully found the restaurant we originally set out to find. Score!

It was full of local families having fun and eating wonderful food.  

Green papaya salad. A very spicy version.

I forgot to take the picture when they brought the dish to the table.

Al least I remembered before I ate all the prawns!

A delicious pork dish

Pork and wintergreens

I was trying to get the attention of the waitress as I needed another Chang

The entrance to the large spacious open eatery  

..... with picture, big ones, out the front so you knew what to expect.

The long but enjoyable day was over and we went to bed on a mattress that was a real Goldilocks unit. Yippee!

Ciao ciao. 

Ci sarà di più domani.