Bridge Over the River Kwai
After Railay, we moved on to Bangkok to obtain our visas for Myanmar. While waiting for our visas to come through, we made a side trip to another big tourist destination, Kanchanaburi. This is the home of the infamous “Bridge Over the River Kwai”, or Death Railway, named so because of the thousands of Allied POW’s and Malay and Burmese civilians that died during construction of the railway during WWII. We walked the bridge, which in and of itself is nothing special, but the trip to the museum that explained the history of the bridge was well worth it. In short, the Japanese wanted a land connection between Burma and Thailand to move supplies, so they built this railway using POW and civilian labor under an intense timeline. Working conditions were horrendous, and over 15,000 POW’s and 100,000 civilians died due to disease and starvation during the period it was built (less than a year and half). The bridge we walked over had been bombed by Allied troops during the war, but was restored and today the railway is intact up to Nam Tok, Thailand, about 60 km north of Kanchanaburi.
So this could be the last blog from us for awhile. We’ll be in Myanmar from Feb 2 – 28th, and from what we’ve read, the internet connections are spotty and probably limited in bandwidth. Feel free to keep in touch via email, and we’ll check when we can. We will plan our next blog update to be beginning of March.
In the meantime, here are some random observations about Thailand, traveling, and our experiences with blogging:
1) We love Thailand…period. It is still inexpensive, easy to travel, the food is incredible, it has some of the best beaches in the world. It is at times overrun with tourists, but in our opinion that still doesn’t overshadow all else.
2) Both of us will likely never get tired of Thai food. Thais are incredibly good cooks, and there are always a gazillion dishes to choose from. With the exception of only two pizzas, we have eaten Thai food for lunch and dinner every day for two months, and have not really even craved any other type of food.
3) “A little spicy” means a lot of different things to different Thai cooks. Eating spicy appears to be an acquired taste. After taking on “Thai-spicy” meals instead of “Foreigner-spicy” we are primed and ready to handle five-stars back in the States.
4) The Thai government overnight buses rock…. no weird transfers, lots of free food, and best of all, an unlimited supply of Thai karaoke videos (they actually bother to translate the words into Arabic script, which isn’t helpful unless you speak Thai…but the videos tell the story).
5) Weirdest Tourist moment: We were on an overnight tourist bus from Krabi to Bangkok. The movie on the bus was The A-Team (entertaining enough for a bus ride). However, when the movie ended it should have been bed-time. However, the next movie came on which was American Pie. Whoever was controlling the DVD down on the lower level of the double-decker bus forgot to push “play” so we were stuck on the DVD menu which cycled Jason Biggs saying “I think I super-glued…uh…myself…to…uh…myself” over and over and over again - until finally someone got up and had them turn it off.
6) In general, Europeans who travel have a lot of tattoos and chain-smoke. We’ve also observed that Europeans are much more comfortable in their bodies than Americans, given the number of Speedos, thongs, and topless walking on the beach going on - especially among those without "talent".
7) Sadly, we are both so tired of hearing “Where you going?” from taxi drivers who don’t want to run the meter that we go out of our way to find alternative modes of transportation whenever possible, even if it takes way longer to get where we need to go (what else do we have to do?)
8) When you say “hello” or “Thank you” in Thai (or probably anything, but that’s mostly what we know), you add a “Kha” or a “Khap” at the end for female or male, respectively. We interpreted this as adding “Kha” if you were speaking to a female or “Khap” if you were speaking to a male. We just realized in the last few days that it’s the gender of the speaker that determines the “kha“ or the “khap”, not the gender of the person you’re speaking to…so we’ve both been referring to ourselves in the wrong gender for a couple months now.
9) Blogspot (and Brian) tracks hits to this blog and so far we have had over 1,200 hits, so we know there is a crowd following us – we hope you are enjoying. Tell your friends because more hits boosts our (Brian’s) egos. There are other things the stats tell us. For example: we notice that two of you out there found our blog by typing “the annals of Elise” into Google. Whoever you are, we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But you might need to pull your mind out of the gutter…
10) Brian has learned that it is important to thoroughly launder his swimsuit often. There have been a couple times on the beach when we’ve both been overpowered by the funk emitted by swim trunks that are over-worn in a hot and humid climate. However, it is not that bad to only have problems such as this.
11) These blog posts are a lot more work than they seem…we’re talking word documents, redlined changes, and more than a few ‘intense discussions’ about what should or should not be included. Including whether the comment about Brian’s swim trunks is TMI. However, we have developed a process of assigning a “blog-entry champion” to draft each entry, then the other gets to be chief editor and redline the crap out of it. This process is a lot like trying to reconcile a bill between House and Senate, but seems to be minimizing the effect on our travel KPI on “disagreements.” (reference: first blog entry for KPI’s).
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