Kanchanaburi Part I
I know, I know, I have been completely remiss in getting more posts up on the blog. I have no excuse. Instead, I will make a peace offering. Four posts in four days, each detailing a day of my recent long weekend in the province of Kanchanaburi. Deal? Hope so.
Our first day in Kanchanaburi has to be prefaced by our arrival and subsequent first evening there. If every trip has to have its low point, we got it out of the way early. The bus ride from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi was rainy but uneventful, and we were in a Sawng Thaew (A pickup truck turned taxi with benches in the back) within moments of getting off the bus. The guest house that we had intended to stay at was full, no room at the inn. Our second choice was more than happy to accommodate us, and the room they gave us was fairly average for the area and price range. A minor setback, but no big deal. We dropped off our bags and went in search of food. The town of Kanchanaburi is fairly large, but there is one main road that runs along the Kwai River from the infamous bridge to the heart of town. Along this main road are literally dozens of Farang owned bars (mostly of the seediest nature and pushing as many prostitutes as drinks) and nearly a dozen or more "guest houses" which are essentially Farang hotels. For anywhere from 150 to 300 Baht a night one gets a clean bed in a clean room with a door that locks, a fan, a clean bathroom that doubles as a shower, and a toilet that is of the gravity-flush variety. More than adequate. There are nicer places on the river, often offering more substantial plumbing and even air conditioning, but they serve the minority clientel. Most Farang here, and there were many, were of the European backpacker variety, and they follow a code that demands the least amount of luxury. We were a ways from the center of town so there were few street vendors and restaurants, though plenty of bars that served food, but they all had a few older white men sitting at the bars staring lazily at beers and generally looking like men fishing for an opportunity. The first restaurant that wasn't decorated horrendously and was without any white people received our patronage. I had Phad Siew Moo (Which in Thai is pronounced Pad Si-ooooooo Moooooo and is really ridiculous sounding to someone who has spoken English their whole lives, and even more difficult to actually say) My fried big noodles with pork was amazing. I would soon discover that the Thai food in Kanchanaburi was perhaps some of the best in all of Thailand. We were fed, and were tired, so we headed back to our room. Things were going very well. That is until we realized two things: just how hard and uncomfortable the bed in our room was, and the proximity of our room to several roosters next door and the road outside. Needless to say there was little or no sleep to be had, and several plots were hatched that would have resulted in the untimely demise of said roosters, had they come to fruition. We checked out as soon as someone appeared to man the front desk, and hiked back up the road to what had been our first choice of temporary residence, Apple Guest House. If we were unable to get a room there, again, there were at least six others along the way we could check out. But as luck would have it, there was a room to be had at Apple, and though it was a bit more expensive than the previous establishment, we were exhausted and cranky and took it.
After tossing our bags into our new (and much improved) room, we dropped into Apple's restaurant for breakfast. We had banana pancakes. They were amazing, so good in fact that the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand made mention of them in their most recent edition. After breakfast we hiked down the main road to see the bridge and the market there. It was a bit of a longer hike than we had anticipated, but we had just eaten a lot of banana pancake, so it was probably just as well. The Bridge over the River Kwai (which is how the Thais refer to it, anxious to encourage its notoriety) is really much smaller than I had anticipated.
Having seen the movie on more than one occasion (the film was not shot in Thailand at all, but in nearby Burma) I expected it to be somewhat larger. In reality, the bridge that stands there today is only partially the bridge that was built in World War II by POWs and local slave labour, large sections of it were rebuilt by the Thai government (the engineering contract went to a Japanese firm, ironically) after the war. It was used for a little more than a decade and then the rail on the line was ripped up and now the bridge remains as a monument to the many Thais, Laos, Indians, Burmese, and (mostly) British POWs who died building what is called "The Death Railway" Perhaps what I found most interesting about the bridge was on a placard some fifty feet away from the bridge itself that revealed that after the war, the British retained control of the bridge, and actually sold it to the Thai government for 50 million Baht. Given the traditionally low stature of the Baht and the rise of inflation, this was an incredible sum of money for Thailand to have paid for a bridge that was already in their country and had been partly built by their own hands. All in all, it was an interesting piece of history to see first hand, memorialized in a way that was very different from the way the United States tends to memorialize such things.
That evening, we signed up for a trip out to the Karen Village for some close encounters with some elephants and their mahouts. We did this through one of the many Trek and Tour companies set up near the bars and guest houses, offering tour packages of all kinds and lengths to see many of Kanchanaburi's more notable sights. Our "guide" was E'ou (spelling is phonetic and not based on anything I ever saw written) and as far as we could tell he was a nearby college student and was likely a relative of the woman we signed up with. He drove us in another Sawng Thaew to the Karen village about an hour away. The Karen, who are half Thai and half Burmese, are elephant people. Every male born into the community is a potential mahout. I'm assuming a certain amount of sexism exists here, since I saw no female mahouts, but I could be wrong. Once we arrived at the village, after turning off the main road and traveling a kilometer or two down a dirt road, we were essentially set loose in the village (and by village I refer to a single row of perhaps a dozen wood huts) and we were soon grabbed by a young boy with a baseball cap that was far too large for his head. The boy led us by hand down a path away from the village to where (we supposed) there would be elephants. The boy spoke no English but seemed to be encouraging us to follow him and leave our friend E'ou behind,
which we did. We had walked no more than a hundred yards when we came over a berm and were only fifteen feet from a juvenile elephant, chained to a post. It is perhaps fair to say that we were a bit in awe of this creature before us who had obviously made ample use of the mud provided by the recent rain. She (we would later be told it was a five year old female) was covered in mud and not allowing our presence to stop her from romping in it. An older white women of unknown origins appeared and proceeded to talk to us and the elephant, though mostly to the elephant, chastising it for being so muddy. She unchained the elephant and it willingly lumbered after her, and we were quick to follow them, along with our little companion with the ungainly hat. We watched as she hosed the elephant down and then proceeded to show us some of the tricks it could do, which included hula-hooping with its trunk, playing a harmonica and dancing (no wonder the circus employed these creatures!), and taking money from one person and putting it in another persons pocket. Which I imagine is the first trick any decent mahout teaches its elephant. E'ou then reappeared and told us to go down to the river, we would get a chance to help bathe an elephant.
Now here I feel I must insert a disclaimer. My experience with the elephants was not unique in the sense that we were special in any way by being allowed to do such a thing. We had paid the guide a sum of money, some of which I am quite sure went into the pocket of the mahout and maybe even the village as a whole; it was built into the tour company's fee, I have no doubt. I am sure that what I experienced happens every day there and at many places like it. That being said, it was a truly awesome experience, well worth whatever money made it possible, and certainly something I would highly recommend to those who get such an opportunity. They say the experience bought and paid for is less sweet than the one stumbled upon or striven for, but in this case, I disagree. End of disclaimer.
We walked down to the river (not sure if this was the River Kwai, or one of its many tributaries, though this water was moving faster and cleaner than the Kwai had at the bridge and hour away) where there was an elephant launch and dock. That's really the only way to describe it: a ramp that went straight into the river and a wooden pier that went out over the water that an elephant could walk up to and its back would be level with the pier. Our elephant, whose name was Ghakani (again, guessing at an English spelling) was already lumbering down the ramp to the water. The first thing that struck me was her size, appreciable only by being compared to a large piece of mining equipment, and the second thing that struck me after she was in the water, was how fast and deep the river was. I looked for life jackets and was relieved to see a few draped over the railing of the pier. At least if I was swept of the back of the elephant I would float downstream in a leisurely manner. After donning a life jacket I simply walked to the edge of the pier where the elephant and mahout were waiting, and got on. The mahout was a youngish looking guy, who would later reveal
himself to be nineteen, and would also reveal the elephant to be twenty-two.
He'd known the elephant a while.
As soon as I was onboard I was armed with a scrubbing brush and a squeeze bottle of some kind of soap, and we headed out into the river. A few elephantine steps towards the center of the river and the water was up past my waist and nearly over the elephant's head. At this point the mahout, who had been in front of me, near the elephant's neck and sitting on its shoulders, climbed over me and instructed me to take the front position. This was perhaps something the elephant had been waiting for, because she immediately took advantage of her mahouts distraction and kneeled. This left the mahout and I (the mahout was not wearing a life-vest, though I imagine he was pretty good swimmer) floating where once there had been an elephant beneath us. Elephants can hold their breath for a considerable amount of time, and I was afraid we had drifted away from her when she finally stood back up beneath us. My seat returned, I began to soap and scrub. Ghakani was enjoying having an idiot Farang in the power position (a mahout controls a tamed elephant with a sharp steel hook called an ankusha that is applied in various manners to the elephant's head and ears) and was kneeling and sometimes laying down in the river, and thus completely disappearing beneath me. This was unnerving, and I'm not going to lie, the mahout sounded more than a little ticked about it himself. She kept coming back up beneath us however, and on one occasion she came up from having gone completely out from under us, and I have a very distinct memory of seeing her massive head and ears coming through the water at me. It was a sight I will not soon forget. Whenever Ghakani did get her ears above water, the mahout behind me would shout all sorts of monosyllabic words in Thai that I'm sure were as much curses as instructions, since several other mahouts back on shore were watching and laughing, I think, less at me than at their comrade who was having trouble with his elephant. Ghakani headed for shore after she had dunked us a half a dozen times, and
on the way in she spewed a trunk-full of water over her head at us, which I caught full in the face. It was amazing. For someone whose favorite ride at Disneyland had always been the Jungle Cruise, this was everything I had imagined it to be. When we, and the elephant, had dried off, the mahout saddled her (which is like strapping a small garden bench to her back) and we took her for a stroll through the nearby hill jungle. The mahout sat on her shoulders and neck and drove, while we sat up in the bench and listened to the mahout butcher American rock'n'roll and Jingle Bells. As we returned to the village, the mahout suddenly dropped off the elephant and said, in the first english we had heard from him all evening, "Okay, you driver now." So I got to climb down off the bench/saddle and ride Ghakani's neck, which requires a certain limberness of the hips, as her shoulder blades where moving up and down with a great deal of force beneath me. It was a very cool experience.
To top off the evening, I was given a bag of bananas to feed to her after we returned and had dismounted. I made the very stupid mistake of asking, "Do I peel them or give them to her whole?" The mahout was kind enough to only grin. All in all, it was a great evening with the elephants.
Tomorrow: The Erawan Falls
Our first day in Kanchanaburi has to be prefaced by our arrival and subsequent first evening there. If every trip has to have its low point, we got it out of the way early. The bus ride from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi was rainy but uneventful, and we were in a Sawng Thaew (A pickup truck turned taxi with benches in the back) within moments of getting off the bus. The guest house that we had intended to stay at was full, no room at the inn. Our second choice was more than happy to accommodate us, and the room they gave us was fairly average for the area and price range. A minor setback, but no big deal. We dropped off our bags and went in search of food. The town of Kanchanaburi is fairly large, but there is one main road that runs along the Kwai River from the infamous bridge to the heart of town. Along this main road are literally dozens of Farang owned bars (mostly of the seediest nature and pushing as many prostitutes as drinks) and nearly a dozen or more "guest houses" which are essentially Farang hotels. For anywhere from 150 to 300 Baht a night one gets a clean bed in a clean room with a door that locks, a fan, a clean bathroom that doubles as a shower, and a toilet that is of the gravity-flush variety. More than adequate. There are nicer places on the river, often offering more substantial plumbing and even air conditioning, but they serve the minority clientel. Most Farang here, and there were many, were of the European backpacker variety, and they follow a code that demands the least amount of luxury. We were a ways from the center of town so there were few street vendors and restaurants, though plenty of bars that served food, but they all had a few older white men sitting at the bars staring lazily at beers and generally looking like men fishing for an opportunity. The first restaurant that wasn't decorated horrendously and was without any white people received our patronage. I had Phad Siew Moo (Which in Thai is pronounced Pad Si-ooooooo Moooooo and is really ridiculous sounding to someone who has spoken English their whole lives, and even more difficult to actually say) My fried big noodles with pork was amazing. I would soon discover that the Thai food in Kanchanaburi was perhaps some of the best in all of Thailand. We were fed, and were tired, so we headed back to our room. Things were going very well. That is until we realized two things: just how hard and uncomfortable the bed in our room was, and the proximity of our room to several roosters next door and the road outside. Needless to say there was little or no sleep to be had, and several plots were hatched that would have resulted in the untimely demise of said roosters, had they come to fruition. We checked out as soon as someone appeared to man the front desk, and hiked back up the road to what had been our first choice of temporary residence, Apple Guest House. If we were unable to get a room there, again, there were at least six others along the way we could check out. But as luck would have it, there was a room to be had at Apple, and though it was a bit more expensive than the previous establishment, we were exhausted and cranky and took it.
After tossing our bags into our new (and much improved) room, we dropped into Apple's restaurant for breakfast. We had banana pancakes. They were amazing, so good in fact that the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand made mention of them in their most recent edition. After breakfast we hiked down the main road to see the bridge and the market there. It was a bit of a longer hike than we had anticipated, but we had just eaten a lot of banana pancake, so it was probably just as well. The Bridge over the River Kwai (which is how the Thais refer to it, anxious to encourage its notoriety) is really much smaller than I had anticipated.
Having seen the movie on more than one occasion (the film was not shot in Thailand at all, but in nearby Burma) I expected it to be somewhat larger. In reality, the bridge that stands there today is only partially the bridge that was built in World War II by POWs and local slave labour, large sections of it were rebuilt by the Thai government (the engineering contract went to a Japanese firm, ironically) after the war. It was used for a little more than a decade and then the rail on the line was ripped up and now the bridge remains as a monument to the many Thais, Laos, Indians, Burmese, and (mostly) British POWs who died building what is called "The Death Railway" Perhaps what I found most interesting about the bridge was on a placard some fifty feet away from the bridge itself that revealed that after the war, the British retained control of the bridge, and actually sold it to the Thai government for 50 million Baht. Given the traditionally low stature of the Baht and the rise of inflation, this was an incredible sum of money for Thailand to have paid for a bridge that was already in their country and had been partly built by their own hands. All in all, it was an interesting piece of history to see first hand, memorialized in a way that was very different from the way the United States tends to memorialize such things.That evening, we signed up for a trip out to the Karen Village for some close encounters with some elephants and their mahouts. We did this through one of the many Trek and Tour companies set up near the bars and guest houses, offering tour packages of all kinds and lengths to see many of Kanchanaburi's more notable sights. Our "guide" was E'ou (spelling is phonetic and not based on anything I ever saw written) and as far as we could tell he was a nearby college student and was likely a relative of the woman we signed up with. He drove us in another Sawng Thaew to the Karen village about an hour away. The Karen, who are half Thai and half Burmese, are elephant people. Every male born into the community is a potential mahout. I'm assuming a certain amount of sexism exists here, since I saw no female mahouts, but I could be wrong. Once we arrived at the village, after turning off the main road and traveling a kilometer or two down a dirt road, we were essentially set loose in the village (and by village I refer to a single row of perhaps a dozen wood huts) and we were soon grabbed by a young boy with a baseball cap that was far too large for his head. The boy led us by hand down a path away from the village to where (we supposed) there would be elephants. The boy spoke no English but seemed to be encouraging us to follow him and leave our friend E'ou behind,
which we did. We had walked no more than a hundred yards when we came over a berm and were only fifteen feet from a juvenile elephant, chained to a post. It is perhaps fair to say that we were a bit in awe of this creature before us who had obviously made ample use of the mud provided by the recent rain. She (we would later be told it was a five year old female) was covered in mud and not allowing our presence to stop her from romping in it. An older white women of unknown origins appeared and proceeded to talk to us and the elephant, though mostly to the elephant, chastising it for being so muddy. She unchained the elephant and it willingly lumbered after her, and we were quick to follow them, along with our little companion with the ungainly hat. We watched as she hosed the elephant down and then proceeded to show us some of the tricks it could do, which included hula-hooping with its trunk, playing a harmonica and dancing (no wonder the circus employed these creatures!), and taking money from one person and putting it in another persons pocket. Which I imagine is the first trick any decent mahout teaches its elephant. E'ou then reappeared and told us to go down to the river, we would get a chance to help bathe an elephant.
Now here I feel I must insert a disclaimer. My experience with the elephants was not unique in the sense that we were special in any way by being allowed to do such a thing. We had paid the guide a sum of money, some of which I am quite sure went into the pocket of the mahout and maybe even the village as a whole; it was built into the tour company's fee, I have no doubt. I am sure that what I experienced happens every day there and at many places like it. That being said, it was a truly awesome experience, well worth whatever money made it possible, and certainly something I would highly recommend to those who get such an opportunity. They say the experience bought and paid for is less sweet than the one stumbled upon or striven for, but in this case, I disagree. End of disclaimer.
We walked down to the river (not sure if this was the River Kwai, or one of its many tributaries, though this water was moving faster and cleaner than the Kwai had at the bridge and hour away) where there was an elephant launch and dock. That's really the only way to describe it: a ramp that went straight into the river and a wooden pier that went out over the water that an elephant could walk up to and its back would be level with the pier. Our elephant, whose name was Ghakani (again, guessing at an English spelling) was already lumbering down the ramp to the water. The first thing that struck me was her size, appreciable only by being compared to a large piece of mining equipment, and the second thing that struck me after she was in the water, was how fast and deep the river was. I looked for life jackets and was relieved to see a few draped over the railing of the pier. At least if I was swept of the back of the elephant I would float downstream in a leisurely manner. After donning a life jacket I simply walked to the edge of the pier where the elephant and mahout were waiting, and got on. The mahout was a youngish looking guy, who would later reveal
himself to be nineteen, and would also reveal the elephant to be twenty-two.He'd known the elephant a while.
As soon as I was onboard I was armed with a scrubbing brush and a squeeze bottle of some kind of soap, and we headed out into the river. A few elephantine steps towards the center of the river and the water was up past my waist and nearly over the elephant's head. At this point the mahout, who had been in front of me, near the elephant's neck and sitting on its shoulders, climbed over me and instructed me to take the front position. This was perhaps something the elephant had been waiting for, because she immediately took advantage of her mahouts distraction and kneeled. This left the mahout and I (the mahout was not wearing a life-vest, though I imagine he was pretty good swimmer) floating where once there had been an elephant beneath us. Elephants can hold their breath for a considerable amount of time, and I was afraid we had drifted away from her when she finally stood back up beneath us. My seat returned, I began to soap and scrub. Ghakani was enjoying having an idiot Farang in the power position (a mahout controls a tamed elephant with a sharp steel hook called an ankusha that is applied in various manners to the elephant's head and ears) and was kneeling and sometimes laying down in the river, and thus completely disappearing beneath me. This was unnerving, and I'm not going to lie, the mahout sounded more than a little ticked about it himself. She kept coming back up beneath us however, and on one occasion she came up from having gone completely out from under us, and I have a very distinct memory of seeing her massive head and ears coming through the water at me. It was a sight I will not soon forget. Whenever Ghakani did get her ears above water, the mahout behind me would shout all sorts of monosyllabic words in Thai that I'm sure were as much curses as instructions, since several other mahouts back on shore were watching and laughing, I think, less at me than at their comrade who was having trouble with his elephant. Ghakani headed for shore after she had dunked us a half a dozen times, and
on the way in she spewed a trunk-full of water over her head at us, which I caught full in the face. It was amazing. For someone whose favorite ride at Disneyland had always been the Jungle Cruise, this was everything I had imagined it to be. When we, and the elephant, had dried off, the mahout saddled her (which is like strapping a small garden bench to her back) and we took her for a stroll through the nearby hill jungle. The mahout sat on her shoulders and neck and drove, while we sat up in the bench and listened to the mahout butcher American rock'n'roll and Jingle Bells. As we returned to the village, the mahout suddenly dropped off the elephant and said, in the first english we had heard from him all evening, "Okay, you driver now." So I got to climb down off the bench/saddle and ride Ghakani's neck, which requires a certain limberness of the hips, as her shoulder blades where moving up and down with a great deal of force beneath me. It was a very cool experience.
To top off the evening, I was given a bag of bananas to feed to her after we returned and had dismounted. I made the very stupid mistake of asking, "Do I peel them or give them to her whole?" The mahout was kind enough to only grin. All in all, it was a great evening with the elephants.
Tomorrow: The Erawan Falls
posted by Ryan at 12:39 AM
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