The Adventure's of Mattie and Julian!: The Motorcycle Diaries

We awoke Wednesday morning to the lovely gardens and peaceful river outside our door at the Jolly Frog GH.

Kanchanaburi isn't a big city, but there are a few things to do that are a bit spaced out and Tuk Tuks aren't around like they are in Bangkok. What were we to do except rent a motorbike! We could have done a bicycle, but I'm really glad we did the motorbike because we ended up going all over the place AND it was only 200 baht for the entire day.

We embraced our adventure bone and went out searching for a real Thai breakfast. Right behind the war cemetery there was this little stand set up that looked really popular. So we went up to check out the grub. It looked kind of like oatmeal in a big pot and it had a sorta greenish tint to it and they were adding a bunch of unknown things to each bowl. They greenish tint almost turned me away but we went ahead and decided to split one. It turned out to be really good! I would have to describe it as rice porridge with pork, Ginger, lemongrass?, and an optional raw egg, for which we opted out.

After we ate, we went to test out our new hog and get used to it before facing the crazy, backwards Thai drivers. It took Julian a while to master the turns but at least it was entertaining to our audience of locals!

Once we got the hang of it, we were off exploring all around Kanchanaburi.

The area has lots of limestone so there are caves all over and we stopped at the Koapoon Cave. It was really big, with 9 rooms and we had it all to ourselves!

We then made our way back to town to see the famed "Bridge Over the River Kwai." We waited there for the train to pass expecting it to be cool, but when it finally did come it was a total disappointment. The single train car was entirely painted in rainbow colors... lame! We didn't deem it worthy of a picture, but we did allow it to squish a baht coin as a souvenir :)

Our next adventure was to the Elephant Center a little outside of town. They had plenty of signs along the way, but no sign for where to actually turn, so we never found it. Instead we kept going out to Erawan Falls. We arrived later in the day than we would have liked, so we didn't get to go swimming or see all 7 of the tiers of the waterfall, but we got to see 4 of them!

On the way back to the front of the park, we came across some people that were feeding monkeys crackers, so we stopped and joined them. They were so cute and hungry. The monkeys would take the crackers and stuff them into pouches in the mouth like a hamster.

On the way back to Kanchanaburi I was a bored passenger so...

We ended up meeting those same people from the park for dinner at this place in the night market. It was only 89 baht for all you can eat/ cook. They had all of the meat, veggies and noodles sitting out raw and then you had to cook it at your table. The middle part was the grill and around it hot water for the noodles and such. Delicious! But it was also hard work.