River Kwai Hotel Kanchanaburi

... you're trying to pet them and play with them. We also learned the hard way that they will stalk you from behind and pounce on you when you're sitting down. I now have a good bite mark on my back from one of them. It'll cool if I have a scar from being bit by a tiger cub. They love to play and love being fed. You get to feed them a bottle of milk and the cub even held out a paw for me to hold, it was so cute. The monastery is undergoing a project to expand the sanctuary to ...

... the results. So Ms. Shirley started to announce (keep in mind there were 11 teams) “In third place, the Orange Tigers.” “In 2nd place, the Brown Monkeys.” “And in 1st place and the winners of the Ninja Games………..the Blue Vipers!” Yep, much like a down-and-out Michigan team beating a highly ranked Florida Gator team, me and my rag-tag group of students won the Ninja Games competition. The kids on my team were all jumping up and ...

... a plan B quickly. After consulting the Guide book which I'm not a fan of as it just says look at me I don't know where I am or what I'm doing, but needs must. Plan B was formed and executed, there was a bus that ran to the same destination every 15mins from South of Bangkok, it wasn't as scenic but we had a room booked and it was silly to waste a day waiting for the train. Another taxi ride later and after buying our bus tickets we were sat on the 7:00 bus to Kanchanaburi, it was down a ...

... that its shortness was just an optical illusion. The famous bridge has been immortalized in a film which carries bares its namesake. The bridge served as a key rail connection between India and China during WWII and was bombed by American fighter planes 3 times between the years of 1942 and 1945.

My final stop of the day was the Tiger Temple. There I came face to face with giant Bengal tigers and got ...

... be with very young and tame baby cubs. Turn out not to be as we expected. The place was supposed to be a reserve where they help tigers but whilst it was that it was a massive money making thing. We paid a lot to get in but for other things you had to pay extra on top. When we first went in there was a massive tiger walking along with the crowd heading for the canyon. People were going up to it and stroking it know probelm. Then when we got to the canyon you had to get ...

... the river, and the new River Kwai bridge a quick walk beyond the museum. The museum was filled with artifacts from the war, and displays of cement men enacting scenes. (We found a little humor in the anatomical correctness of the scantily clothed statues.). I had forgotten a lot of the story of the Bridge, which was built and rebuilt by the Japanese using prisoners of war - this museum had a local slant and focused on the Thai and Burmese prisoners. They were ...

... wipe the shocked and slightly peeved expressions from our faces. It was not until we were nestled back into our rented room that we truly realized to what a close extent we had actually been to living-and-breathing tigers! Watching the young tigers frolicking about an enclosure with a waterfall was definately the highlight of this place. By the end of our time at the Tiger Temple, I was at wit's end; my dreads needed to come out! Or else I was ...

... there. So I'm working on erasing that show from my memory and will be having a relatively quiet night.. a nice meal to say good bye to Mike. We have been traveling with him for 2 months now!!! The longest we have traveled with anyone this entire trip. Tomorrow we are going to head south towards the islands and mike has decided to fly into Burma (Myanmar). So the next time you will be hearing from me will be the islands and hopefully i ...

... out of the town to the surrounding countryside, it's lush, green farmland hemmed in by mountains on all sides which can just be seen as Tolkein-esque misty mounds in the distance. Naturally because of the location of the town on the River Kwai, there is a great deal opf memorials and museums about the POW railway which featured in the film. Most of these are aimed at getting tourists to buy memorabilia but I went to one museum which is a ...