Kanachanaburi train tour - signs

A few English signs (and some English on a coffee cup) we saw during our Kanachanaburi train tour.

The coffee cup is particularly interesting to me from my English teaching days. In Thai you don't generally have hard consonants at the end of words, so someone learning English here will generally skip the hard sound at the end of a word like 'milk'. Instead, the sound spoken will sound the same as 'mayo'. On the cup, 'milk' is spelled like it often sounds here - 'miu'. A lot of the English transcription here is like this, so some degree of understanding of the Thai accent when speaking English is often needed to decipher signs or writing with less context than the cup.

Also, that's the first 'most wanted' sign we've seen while here. And that's one happy cartoon squid selling his squid brand fish sauce - because everything goes better with some fermented fish!

Kanachanaburi train tour - Sai Yok Noi waterfall

The longest stop on the train tour was at Sai Yok Noi waterfall. It was a chance to see tourism how the locals do it - lots of families and children. It had sort of a Wisconsin Dells atmosphere, and the kids were having a ball with the water. Pleasant rural setting, festive and laid back - what's not to like?

Kanachanaburi train tour - River Kwai bridge

Surprisingly few people whistled the song from the movie as they walked across. Actually, no one did - it make the experience completely different than I thought it would be. The big draw for everyone seemed to be the tight clearance on each side of the train. And the unexploded ordnance.

Kanachanaburi train tour - Pathom Chedi

Our first stop on the Kanachanaburi train tour was Pathom Chedi - the tallest chedi in all the land. It was very old, and had been rebuilt a few times over the years. Neat to see, and what a quaint town it was housed in. And wow, did the street market around the train station have some good eats!

Kanachanaburi train tour

We took a train tour from Bangkok that went to Pathom Chedi, Kanachanaburi/River Kwai, and Sai Yok Noi waterfall.

The train tour itself was a very interesting experience. Sam and I loved the lazy, languid train ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, and we equally loved this all day train tour as well. And it was all day - the train left Bangkok 6:30AM and didn't get back until about 9PM or so. But what a great, relaxed way to see the Thai countryside! The idea is you buy one ticket, and the train stops a few places where you have between 30 and 90 minutes to get out and see the sights (and over 2 hours for lunch). We were nearly the only non-locals on the train, so we got to see what the locals do for fun. A nice old fellow would walk up and down the aisles with a megaphone and announce the places we were passing by and where we were headed. And what beautiful countryside - from the flat rice-growing central plains, to the river/mountain/jungle region of western Thailand. The route was mostly along the famous 'Death Railway', and we saw the bridge over the River Kwai, but it seemed incongruent to spend too much time dwelling on such sober memorials when all around was pleasant countryside and families enjoying a holiday. There was one place we passed by that had houseboats on the river people rented out for their vacation, and kids would jump from one houseboat, float downstream, and climb back up on another houseboat, ready to do it again.

So we relaxed, saw the sights, people-watched, and had a great time!