Day 100 - 101 Kanchanaburi

Wow I realized that this weekend marked my 100th day of traveling. I can't believe how fast everything has gone. I have been blessed to see many things and meet some wonderful people. If the rest of this trip is anything like the first 100 days, I have a lot to look forward to in the next months!

This weekend I traveled with a group of friends to Kanchanaburi, which is west of Bangkok and only about 100 km from Buhrma (by bus it took about 2.5 hours). We arrived Friday night and stayed at a floating guesthouse on the river. It was a first for me, every time a boat would come by the whole place would rock back and forth. The room had one light and no running water (we could shower on land and was 150B ($4/night)). Kind of like camping with a water bed!

Kanchanaburi is home to the most famous waterfall in Thailand at Erawen National Park, so we traveled by bus to get to the park on Saturday. The falls are not the largest falls but they have perfectly clear mountain water flowing through the seven tiers. My friend, Lindsey, is from Hawaii and she said she has never seen water like it. In fact, they were filming an American movie (suppose to be based in Hawaii) at the falls that day. We didn't have access to two tiers, because of the film crews were shooting different scenes. We hiked up the whole thing in about one hour, swam in the lagoons and slid down the rocks to get back to the bottom. We ended up spending the whole day there! It was gorgeous and fun! This was one place I would definitely come back to in Thailand if I return.

On Sunday, we stayed in Kanchanaburi to tour the city, which is famous for its ties to WWII. During the war the Japanese tried to take over all of Indo - China and the easiest way for them to do that was by building a railway system. So they captured Thai men and women, as well as, POW's from different countries (Europeans and Austrilians) and worked them to death building the railway system into Buhrma. They would work 14 - 16 hour days in the excruciating heat without proper portions of food, water, or medicine. Over 100,000 captives were actively involved in the project and over 16,000 died building the 300 km railway. We visited the JETHRO museum which documented the history of the war and the "death railway" and walked across the River Kwai bridge that was built by the captives (there is a famous movie called the Bridges over River Kwai, which also documents the tragedy). After seeing these two sites we went to a WWII cemetery in the middle of the town where over 6,000 men are laid to rest. I did not realize that Thailand had such a connection to WWII before today.