rtw with lucy

We visited a city called Kanchanaburi in Thailand. It was really one of the best places we visited. There are several things of interest in this town. First of all the town is infamous due to the Movie “The bridge over the river Kwai”-this town has a museum and cemetary related to the prisoners of war who were forced to build the ” death railroad” tracks from Thailand into Burma during WW2. The Japanese held the prisoners in camps under deplorable conditions and many many American,Dutch,English,Australian and Asians died during the war. The JEATH museum gives a history of the Japanese brutality. We were at the museum at the same time some Japanese tourists were there. Some went through in a big hurry(guilt?) and one Japanese lady seemed very overcome with emotion. We took a ride on the train that goes over the bridge and into the hills for about two hours. The scenery was beautiful and the trip made more meaningful knowing the history of the rail line. I would suggest this train trip for anybody visiting Thailand. Now about the tiger temple, outside of Kanchanaburi is a Monks temple where you can visit and actually pet full grown tigers. The monks have taken in abandoned and injured tigers and are developing a breeding program so that the tigers may be released to the wild. There is a small canyon where they take the tigers and chain them. Visitors are taken one by one(holding hands) with a trainer and are allowed to get down to tiger level and pet the tiger and have pictures taken. Crazy as it sounds it seems safe but we were still nervous about letting Erin and Lucy do it. But we did and below are some pictures. The complex also has other animals and one time a day the monks throw out food in the street and hundreds of cows,wild pigs, horses, peacocks,barking deer,goats all feed together. The strange zoo is also expanding and eventually there will be natural habitat for the tigers to run free in. We did enjoy the experience- we had read stories on the internet that the tigers were drugged and not very well cared for but we did not observe this. The tigers were lazy and mostly laid down but cats do this anyway in the heat of the day- nothing out of the ordinary. Tiger temple is grrrrreat! Gene

We’re in Thailand now and have been here a week. Bangkok is one big noisy smelly city, and our guidebook warned us to watch out for tuk tuk drivers, as they will generally try to drive you to a jewelry shop and collect a commission from the shop, which will try to talk you into buying gems. These are generally scams, as the gems are often fake. We were determined to avoid this, but late in the afternoon of the first day we were here, we were hot, very tired, and wondering which way to go next. We made the mistake of stopping on the sidewalk to consult our map, when a very friendly gentleman approached us and asked if we needed help. We didn’t really, but got into conversation with him and he just mentioned in passing that the bright green tuk tuks were sanctioned by the government TAT (Thai Authority of Tourism) office and that they wouldn’t pull any funny business. Then he left, and a bright green tuk tuk just happened to pull up and offer us a ride to the TAT office, which was a place we needed to go, so we made a deal and got in. It was a hair raising experience, because a tuk tuk is just basically a small ricketty cart pulled by a motorcycle, and you can barely get 4 people in besides the driver.

In about 15 minutes we arrived at the TAT office, a very official looking brick building with a big gold TAT in front. We went in to ask some general questions, and the next thing we knew, we were signed up for an island trip and booked into a couple of resorts. This was not exactly what we had in mind, though we had planned to visit the beaches in southern Thailand. The price was not excessive though, and we felt we had made a good decision. After that, we left with our tuk tuk driver to visit a temple.

The temple was beautiful, but when we had seen it, we asked the driver to take us back to our hotel, since it was getting late in the afternoon and we had pulled an all nighter the night before. He looked about ready to cry and said that if we did that, he would not get the commission from the jewelry shop he was planning to take us to. This aroused our sympathy, so we agreed to go, figuring we’d go have a quick look and then leave. Wrong.

We were greeted at the door by 3 beautiful Thai ladies in silk dresses who put their hands into a prayer position and bowed to us as they said, “Sawasdee kah!” This was very impressive, but I hardened my heart. Then we were led into a huge, brand new, and very professional looking building, and I had an inkling that this would not be an easy thing to escape. The atmosphere inside was hushed and we were handed off to a man in a business suit, who took us into the gem cutting room to peer through a microscope and see that the gems are real. They knew we had heard the warnings about the fake jewels and wanted to be sure that we understood that we were dealing with professionals.

Once he managed to convince us that this was the real thing, he handed us off to a lady salesperson, also in a business suit. She was very kind, and very friendly and showed us racks and racks of different rings while she tried to figure out what we were interested in. (Nothing.) We stayed as long as was humanly polite, which was about 15 minutes longer than we originally intended, then muttered excuses and made for the door. Her attitude went from warm to frosty, and we were sternly told that we could not go out the front door but had to go out the side door, which sounded even better, until we realized that this took us through another huge store which was full of very nice things like handcarved teak tables and beautiful china sets and many other things that we had no intention of buying. By this time we were practically running, but that didn’t discourage another lady from trying to make a sale. She ran after us calling, “But look at this table, look at this china set, look at this. . .” She chased us all the way to the door, but fortunately left off after we got outside. Our tuk tuk driver was very disappointed in us for not buying anything but we were too tired to care, though we gave him some extra money for his pains when he got us safely delivered.

Our trip was scheduled for a couple of days hence, and we reread the warnings about tuk tuk drivers, and resolved to never take another one in Bangkok. But as we went around the city, we noticed that the TAT logo was on quite a few buildings, and we also heard that a lot of unscrupulous travel agencies would identify themselves as the TAT, and we really began to worry that we’d been had. I took the precaution of having copies made of all the receipts, but still worried that we’d lost our money. My mood went back and forth as I weighed the evidence for honesty and theft, and it wasn’t looking too good. I imagined telling everyone at home that it all started with a tuk tuk ride. . .

The bus we were to take was an all night luxury bus with air con. It was a double decker and we had to get a shuttle ride over to it. I felt better about the whole thing when we got on the shuttle, but worse when he dropped us off in the middle of a busy street that most definitely did not look like a bus stop. Then when we noticed other travellers starting to gather there we felt better again. And someone came out and counted us all, so I felt even better. Then they led us around a half a block to where some big buses were and had us stand there, but didn’t explain anything, and then all the buses loaded up and left, and I began to worry again that it was all a fraud. After waiting awhile longer, they led us around another half block again, and there we began to load onto a bus. Ahh. Maybe this was for real after all.

The bus ride. Well, where do I begin on that one? It was decorated very colorfully in a party pink and passion purple theme. It was colder than a butcher’s freezer, and they played R rated American movies for the next several hours, with all the lights off, so we had no choice but to watch them. The first one was a Miami Vice type thing with scads of F-words thrown in for effect, but the second one was totally tasteless, totally nasty, and pretty funny, so that there was no way to keep the girls from watching it. Let’s just say that it was part of their homeschooling. No, let’s not. But they did get educated. I told them later that it was everything that I didn’t want them to know, rolled up into one very stupid movie.

There was a door to our part of the bus which was to be kept shut, but it soon became evident that the door knob was broken and the door would not open without great effort. We pointed it out to the bus conductor, but he couldn’t fix it. The rest of the night was a back and forth “fight” about keeping the door open or shut. Finally he gave up and just locked us in–away from the bathroom and creating a nightmare of a fire hazard. We were a very disgruntled bunch who finally disembarked into a dirt road at 5:30 a.m.–cold, hungry, tired, and lined up for the bathroom.

After about an hour and a half, a songthaew (a pickup truck with 2 rows of seats in the back), pulled up, and took us several miles to a shabby van, where we were loaded up again, and at least it was a bus that gave us a ride to where we were going, and it remained to be seen how the hotel room was going to be. We arrived at about 11:00 in the morning to a cool glass of fresh orange juice served in an oasis like setting deep in a rainforest glade. The room was shaded and lovely and the pool was a clear blue. Yes. We were in business, and everything was exactly as the travel agent had described it. We found out later that everything in the area was indeed booked up and we could not have done it better by ourselves, so I guess we weren’t too stupid after all, though we came by all of it rather unintentionally. Stephanie