Ayutthaya

Ayutthaya is Thailands old capital, about 70km north of Bangkok. I'd done some researching of the floods and found this site which mentioned that the water level had gone down about two weeks ago. So I decided to head in that direction, if the roads were cut I could always detour somewhere.

I came in along the 324 road (or 321?) and there are still lots of people camped up on the road, there's still water everywhere beside the roads too but I'm not sure if it's there normally and just higher now. There were submerged houses in places so I assume it's not always that wet.

This side road was open, but many of the smaller roads off the main highway were under about half a meter of water. 

I found this little track and decided to explore! It was muddy in parts, but I made it!

You can see on the houses where the water came up to. I guess it covered the road when it was that high too.

ROADWORKS. EVERYWHERE. Got covered in dust, and then mud after they were  spraying water.

So I'm not sure if this is normally a lake?

Lots of trees near roads had fallen over. The ground has been wet for about a month so I saw this a few more times.

People parked and camped out on the highway, there are a lot of these camps closer to Ayutthaya. Some people still running shops.

And this is why...

And just out of town the elephants are now living next to the road because their usual place is flooded. Also, they eat A LOT.

These ones with the babies were right next to the road.

And there were lots more!

In the city itself you can see the water level on all the buildings about 2 meters higher than street level. They were still cleaning up the streets but there was no water on the roads anymore.

This was on the western side. The water is very fast moving.

Across the river they are still pumping water out.

Some of the temples still have water around.

But because the tourist numbers were down I got to wander around a lot of the temples alone. They weren't charging anything to enter them either! Some where still closed however, like the one above. They had busloads of people coming to help clean up though.

And if you like temples, here are some temple photos!

Wat Ratburana

A tree must have been growing against the wall and they've pulled it down now.

Wat Sri Sanphet

Wat Mahathat 

Apparently in the high season it's very hard to get near this because of the number of tourists. I was the only one there yesterday.

Wat Sri Sanphet

I went back to Sri Sanphet because I realised my camera settings were set wrong and retook a few more photos.

And that's all for temples. Now I'm in Lobburi for the monkey feeding festival tomorrow! The town has been taken over by monkeys, right outside my window I can see 4 of them.

Some odd thing I just remembered too, is that brown shelled eggs are about 5 times the price of white eggs here because no one wants the white ones. There's another culture like that but I think they only eat the white eggs. Confusing.

Kanchanaburi leftovers

So now that's two bodies I've seen in a month. Many years with the count at zero and it jumps up to two in a month. This one was on the way back from Hellfire cutting, another scooter accident, with another local not moving on the ground near it.

Anyway, back to Kanchanaburi. I visited the "Death Railway" museum and had a look around. It had a lot of info in it and looked like they actually did research from there. Lots of stuff about the POW camps and how some of the locals helped get them supplies., They mentioned the non-POW workers too, there were around 6000 dead from Australia and England but there were also about 90000 who were not POW's.

The cemetery across the road from the Museum.

After that I headed to the "JEATH" museum. And it was.... Different. Lots of stuff on display and not just War stuff, but everything. There was a room for Miss Thailand with paintings of them over one wall, and various examples of cloth. There were statues of Hitler, Mussolini etc with lots of text beside each one. Lots of old Japanese vehicles and weapons from the war. Large rooms for watches, stamps and currency. Various gemstones on display. And in another building I think it was the brief history of Thailand over 4 floors but people had thrown money into the displays here, not sure why. Then in another part I stumbled into an area that was devoted to the red shirts and had lots of news articles of it all on the wall.

ENGRISH

Some odd paintings on the wall...

Very very strange place. Then as I was walking out I almost tripped over an Iguana. Oh.. And that brief moment of panic when I saw a Cheetah in front of me. It was being loaded back onto a bus but I don't think it wanted to be there.

There was access to the roof in one of the buildings so I got up and looked around.

Looking south.

The JEATH museum was right near the bridge so I waited round that area because I knew a train would be coming along between 5 and 6. I wanted to try get on the bridge while it was crossing. But I was just a little bit too late..

They wouldn't let me on :(

Next up, heaps of photos of Ayutthaya and the floods. I'll put that in a separate post because there are a lot of photos!

Hellfire Pass

Today I went to Hellfire Pass, 80km closer to the Burma/Myanmar border. It was the longest cutting along the 'Death Railway' and lots of the POW's died there, but also a lot of the Malaysian workers who came for work also died but they are undocumented. The

Museum and the general overall improvements on access was a joint Australian-Thai government thing, there's a plaque on the wall of the museum that said John Howard was there to officially open it.

Here's all the details in photo form so I don't have to write it out. Also there's a reflection of me!

And here's some more info if you want to read up on it too.

Walkway to the cutting along the railbed.

This is a bit of the original railway, but as the plaque below explains it was put there in 2006.

See, it explains it. Also looks like visitors from Melbourne have been here.

The cutting. It's a lot longer and taller than it looks in the photo.

A broken drill bit.

A memorial at one end of the cutting

The little crosses at the bottom.

After the cutting the trail continues, this is where there would have been a bridge however.

The view over Kwae Noi valley. With virtual GND applied.

The monument at one end of the cutting.

Looking down on the cutting.

The stairs out. There were many more of these than I would have liked. This was also the long way out which I accidently took.

I'm staying in Kanchanaburi for an extra two nights. I looked at the map and realised I had traveled half the country in ten days, I've got 30 days to get to Laos so I'll waste more time here looking at the museums (and drinking beer).

Hua Hin and Kanchanaburi

After I left Ban Krut I headed to the budda that I could see sitting on the hill to have a look.

This is it. Very shiny.

The guards on the road leading up to another temple which I didn't look at.

Around the base of this are people doing their offerings of food and drinks and whatever. Usually you'll see an orange or some rice and a small drink with the incense burning around it. I assume it's an offering and that you're supposed to leave it there. I've never seen anyone clean it up. But at this place there were some people who had left an open bottle of Hennesy reserve, and a full roast duck sitting on a table. I thought that was quite an offering, but they took it away after it had been there only a while. I don't know the rules on offering and my quick googling doesn't reveal anything. Maybe the time needed for an offering is inversely proportional to the expense of the items.

After that little detour, I got petrol, and then did a 160km stint without getting off the bike. That's the longest I've done so far. I used to stop every 50km but that just flies by, so now it's every 100km but I guess I've just extended that further again.

I was expecting Hua Hin to be built up and crazy, and it was. There are a lot of tourists here, and a lot of people from Bangkok were escaping the floods but now they are starting to head back. The hotel I stayed in only had 3 people staying in it, but they said it was full a few days ago (more on that later).

Once I checked in I went to find the local TAT office, which is the offical Thai tourism office, any other info place is a tour company. I had hoped to get some info on road closures from the floods because I know there are areas north of Bangkok that are still flooded but they aren't in the news anymore. But the TAT are hopeless and don't really know what's going on or where to find out that sort of info. I did mange to get a few maps out of them though, one was actually useful. I also bought the local English language paper, but it had no details on roads either.

So then I just wandered aimlessly around.

The fishing boats unload here.

There's a Navy ship on the right in that photo, and just out a bit further were a couple of others. Seemed like a lot to guard the fish. But later on I learned that the King has an official residence in Hua Hin, so perhaps he was in town, didn't see anything else to verify that.

The farang part of Hua Hin.

There are guesthouses in the piers just right of center in that photo, and then a maze of pubs and restaurants mainly for foreign tourists . On the left is where the actual beach starts, but it's covered in people and market stalls.

Looking north towards Cha Am. I expect it goes on like that for much further though.

This street was on the edge of the densely packed tourist area. 

It's very touristy but not to the scale of Phuket because a lot of Thais holiday here too. I thought it wasn't that busy (except for the main road) but I was told that this is still considered busy for this area.

That night when I was about to sleep I was wondering why I was so itchy, then I saw a bed bug full of my blood crawling away... Since the room had two single beds I swapped to the other but cleaned off any bugs that I could see first. I also tried my mosquito repellent to try keep them off me but I'm not sure that worked. I don't have any marks on me, but I could feel them crawling around. This meant I didn't get too much sleep from all the checking to see if I have any on me. Hopefully I didn't bring any with me either.

So then the next morning I packed up and headed to Lins near Soi 80 for breakfast. It was mentioned on some english expat forums that it's the best breakfast in town. And it was. Best bacon ever, sausage, eggs, and bread which I suspect was fried in lard (it was an english place after all). A few people asked me where I was going etc, it's getting boring repeating this... One guy talked to me about motorbikes from across the restaurant while I was eating, then he got food and I thought he would give me a chance to really concentrate on eating, but no, that didn't slow him down. I nodded my way through my bacon. 

I was warned that because it was a Sunday most of the people from bangkok would be heading home and the highway north would be very busy. But it wasn't too bad. No worse than any other day. There's a northbound only expressway in the middle of the highway which just started all of a sudden. I think from the signs that motorcycles and trucks were banned from it but I stayed on it for a long time because there were no trucks!

I eventually arrived at Kanchanaburi and stopped at a park to research my options for accommodation. 

This is the park. Those house looking things are floating resturants. This is in the more thai tourist area of Kanchanaburi.

I eventually found a big room with aircon right on the river for 400baht/night. It's not the main part of the river however, but that's good because the boats are on the other side of an island.

This is the the view from the chair in front of my room.

From the steps just to the right of my room.

Kanchanaburi is the start of the death railway, and "The bridge over the river kwai" is here. Only, it's not the same bridge anymore. And it's pronounced more like "Kwhere". 

The bridge.

Underneath they are setting up for two weeks of reenacting the bombing of the bridge with a sound and light show... Apparently it's very popular, they had seating set up too.

There was a plaque nearby with the history of how it was built/rebuilt etc. The part that I found odd was that the Japanese built it under a contract from the Thai government, then it was destroyed, and when the British took over they sold it back to the Thai government. It might be a bad translation, or a bad interpretation by me, but I should look that up.

I'm here for two nights, tomorrow I'll go look at the war museums, and maybe try and stand on the bridge as a train is going past. 

More photos from Ban Krut

I actually stayed another night, how rare that I'd do something like that... I got up the next morning and found that the next place I'd planned to visit was only 40km away, so I figured I'd spend a bit more time trying to find somewhere and get a 200-300km day out of the way so I can try get past Bangkok the next day.

I'm still not sure where I'm going tonight, probably Hua Hin, but it's a big resort town and might be filled with locals escaping the floods. There's always the national park nearby that I can camp at. The humidity here has dropped from the 80's to 20%ish, makes it feel a lot cooler so camping can be an option!

The closest I got to sunrise yesterday. It was really red from the haze, but I was 10 minutes to late :(

The very quiet beach at 6:30am.

The coconut trees get an odd blueish colour to them at sunset.

Post sunset colours

Another palm tree, GTA Vice City style.

Now it's time to get packing...

Ban Krut

Nothing much to report on the road. Trucks everywhere, trucks overtaking trucks at 70-80ish, cars doing 150ish, the road in various states of repair, you know, the usual.

This is a nice spot, not too busy, but a fair share of western, chinese and thai tourists. This place is 430-ish-km from Bangkok, so it's a drive for them if they want to come this far. There is a train station and buses, but I guess a lot of people just don't stop. The Burmese border is only 14km away, maybe I should visit it!

I ended up staying at the place I linked earlier, Siripong Guesthouse, very cheap at 250baht/night. But the usual hard bed, and asian style squat toilet in this room. It's right near the beach though. There's a couple of long term (>6 months) residents here, one of them even grabbed keys for the rooms and showed me around, very helpful! There's a couple of americans here too that I saw down at JJ's (BEST BURGERS EVER), had a long chat and then we met up again down at the special Thursday market (2pm to 6pm, odd hours?) to sample some of the random foods. The chicken there was the best awesome chicken ever, along with the random dumpling things, and fried bananas.

This here is Survivor country!

The view across from JJ's.

Sunset tonight. Eastern facing beach, maybe I'll get up for sunrise, probably not though.

Your new desktop background, you're welcome.

Tomorrow it's off to Maggies in Prachuap Khiri Khan, or maybe I'll stay here for another night...

Some quick stats now that I have the data off the GPS:

Days away: 154

Litres of Petrol: 849

KM travelled: 14867

Longest day: 602km (queensland coast somewhere)

L/100km: 5.71

mpg: 49

$/km: 0.99