Tigers, Temples, and Ducks? Oh my...

So Bangkok was a pretty crazy ride, so it only makes sense that the place that Matt, Sharon, Mike, and I went should be a little more low key.  I'm just going to call the four of us the pack, yeah... I like the way that sounds, got a nice ring to it.  We left Bangkok on a bus and made our way northwest (more west than north though) to a place called Kanchanaburi.  The town is known for being the site of the "Bridge over the river Kwai" which is a very famous book and now a movie about how messed up the Japanese were to there enemies during 'dubya dubya two'.  The Japanese made their prisoners of war build this bridge over, you guessed it, the Kwai river in breakneck time.  Many many many people died in the process thus making it a historical atrocity that people love to flock to, us included.  More on that in a minute but first let me describe this place.  Kanchanaburi is a really nice and quaint little town with lots of guesthouses all along the Kwai river, we all made it a point to make sure we could say "hey not only did I visit the bridge of the river Kwai, but I also slept on it," and so we did.

01 Sunset on the river from our guesthouse

We found a floating guesthouse right on the banks of the river and got lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking of the wavelets every night.  Well almost.  You see the thing about this river and all the guesthouses that are built on or near it is that they bring a lot of foreign and Thai people on holiday (that's the english word for vacation, I wish that one day they'd learn how to speak english good darn it).  So since there's a lot of people in the frame of mind of "hey let's have a good time while were here" there comes into existence things like the Disco Duck.  The Disco Duck is a large ferry that serves as a traveling aquatic club that plays only bad music continuously from about 11pm to 5am while it goes up and down the river.  They also make sure to have one rather short playlist that they simply repeat ad nauseam until the whole evening is over.  Yeah, we never went aboard the Disco Duck but I feel like I've been there many times, many many god awful times.  Luckily Mike and I don't really have too much trouble falling asleep and we were fortunate enough to be on the side of the floating raft house further from the Duck's path of sonic destruction. 

02 Another view of that same sunset

So apart from the Disco Duck the floating raft house was perfect! Being that there really isn't much to do in Kanchanaburi but lounge about and visit the bridge, Mike and I did the only we know how to do in situations like this, we rented motorbikes and set out on a campaign of exploration of the neighboring areas, mainly looking for winding twisty roads to carve up as fast as we can manage.  We convinced Matt to get a bike too, although it wasn't hard, you could see he was all about it even though Sharon felt differently.  On the first day of motorbikes we explored the completely forgettable dry ass terrain, found a cool cafe, and visited the Tiger Temple.  All along the way Matt's bike acted up and somehow Sharon and Mike found ways of burning themselves on Matt's exhaust.  Mike's burn was understandable however, since it involved using the kick start and having his foot slip in the movements, Sharon's however, I just don't know.  She managed to severely burn her leg on the exhaust and boy was it nasty!  It must have been at least a second degree burn and she had to resort to gauze and whatever antibacterial ointments we happened to have on hand, I mean, it was really gross.  We all felt really bad for her and understood when she said she would rather not get on the the motorbikes the following day. So on to the Tiger Temple. 

03 Matt and Sharon getting ready to roll

The Tiger Temple is a place where monks literally raise and take care of tigers.  The place has a slightly interesting history too.  Once upon a time (sometime in the sixties I believe) there was a tiger cub that was ordered to be caught and stuffed by some rich bastard.  The tiger cub was captured but the taxidermist messed up and didn't inject enough embalming fluid to kill the cub and it was subsequently released into the wild, by that I mean they just left it out to die, don't ask me why.  Well someone found it and brought it to this monastery to see if the monks could save it.  The monks did a damn good job but the cub only lived five or so more months.  After that however people began bringing other poor tiger cubs that were survivors of poachers and before long, the monastery became a tiger rescue haven.  Now they have a substantial community of tigers and they are upgrading there monastery to hold more tigers and all the tourists they can draw in.  It's pretty cool to see a tiger up close, unlike a zoo however, you can actually go to the 'Tiger Canyon' and walk right up to the tigers themselves and take a picture while petting them.  I don't know what happened to my pictures of that but they've vanished, not cool. 

04 This is how we travel

Anyways we all went and made a day of the place, it was pretty cool and Sharon loved it, good thing because she had been having such a miserable day on the bikes up until that point.  Afterwards we left the Tiger Temple and made our way back, making sure to stop at a cave along the way.  There were many caves along the way and we decided to stop at the first one we encountered.  It was a cave behind another monastery, and as we climbed up the many steps that led to its entrance, we could see that we had picked a really beautiful time of the day to arrive.  It was late in the afternoon but no where near dark, the colors were beginning to take on that warmth that only yellow can bring, and the breeze was mild.  We entered the cave and saw that it was converted to a shrine for Buddha, you can always tell it's a shrine for Buddha when there's a shrine with a Buddha in it staring at you as you come in.  I love redundancy.  The cave was pretty large and we had to bust out our flashlights to creep into some of the darker areas.  We noticed one of these areas as nothing more than a small hole at the base of the rock wall at the back of the cave.  I shined a flashlight on it and noticed the lack of a reflection, cool, this was as passage way to who knows what. 

05 It took a little while to solve this puzzle