Today's outing was in a taxi, a converted pickup truck with bench seats in the back for 2 hours. The air-conditioning was basically the wind in your face as the taxi drove at 60 miles an hour along the main roads. As you can imagine this got quite annoying after a while. The only good thing about the trip was that the journey was broken up in to two as we had a stopover at the Death Railway museum, which showed the relics and photos of how the POW’s were treated while being forced to build the railway from Burma to Thailand.

The museum was called the JEATH War Museum:-

The JEATH War Museum is one of two war museums in Thailand about the Death Railway built from 1942 to 1943 by Allied POWs under the direction of the Japanese. The museum was founded in 1977 by the chief abbot of Wat Chaichumpol Venerable Phra Theppanyasuthee. It is located on the grounds of a temple at the junction of the Khwae Yai and Khwae Noi rivers in Kanchanaburi. The acronym JEATH stands for the five main nationalities involved in the construction of the railway: Japanese, English, Australian, American, Thai and Holland.

The portion of the museum depicting the construction of the Death Railway is meant to recreate the quarters used by Allied POWs. It includes a prehistoric view on the province as well as the Miss Thailand contest room.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEATH_War_Museum

After the museum, it was back in to the taxi for a trip to the Erawan National park to walk up to the seven tiered waterfall and also go for a swim in them. We arrived at the national park and paid our entrance fee (which I must add was more expensive for tourists than for locals) and then had some lunch.

After lunch we walked up to the waterfalls. At the lowest level, waterfall 1 which was the busiest, we got our first glimpse of the monkeys that were in the park. You had to be careful with these monkeys as they have got used to people being around and knowing that they normally come with food for a picnic. These monkeys were clever, they would almost use the distraction technique by one monkey coming up to people eating from the front while another couple came up from behind and started taking food, bags and even cameras. Basically they would take anything they could get their hands on to see if there was food in it. We saw one grab a rucksack and head straight up in to the trees, the bag was not seen again.

We walked up to level 3 first which was the biggest water fall and also had the best pool for swimming in. We all got our swimming gear on and went in for a swim, only to find that the fish in the water would swim over to you and attach themselves to your legs and mainly your feet and start nibbling (sucking) at them!!! As you can guess, this was very weird and I jumped straight out! Not wanting to look like a big girlie, I made sure I got back in and kept kicking so that the fish could not attach themselves to me again so easily and swam over to the waterfall where I climbed out and sat safely out of the water pretending to admire the view and not look like I was just hiding from the fish

After a while I quickly swam back only managing to get fish on my feet as I got out of the water. I asked Alex if he would pose for me as a foot model so that I could get some pictures for you to look at, but the fish have not come out too well on the close up picture, but you can see them better on the wide angle photo.

After we had all had enough of being eaten, although some people enjoyed it and there are many spas in Thailand where you have to pay to have this done, we hiked up to level 4 and 5 to see more of the waterfall and by this time no one could be bothered to go any further up so we hiked back down to the taxi waiting in the car park.

And for today’s lesson:-

Erawan National Park is a 550-square-kilometer park in western Thailand located in Kanchanaburi Province, Amphoe Si Sawat in the tambon Tha Kradan. Founded in 1975, it is Thailand's 12th national park.

The major attraction of the park is Erawan Falls, a waterfall named after the erawan, the three-headed white elephant of Hindu mythology. The seven-tiered falls are said to resemble the erawan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erawan_Waterfall

On the way back, Alex, Julie & Damien and I got dropped off about 6km from the hotel on the river Kwae and we took a kayak downstream and under the famous River Kwae Bridge and back to the hotel. On the way back we passed a few boats full of tourists taking our pictures and also got our pictures taken as we passed under the bridge, oh to be famous.