-
Day 20
Oh yeah – that hurts. Sunburn was as bad as I expected. This was the last day of the tour, and after breakfast I set about the serious business of lying in my hammock reading my book, stopping only briefly at 11 to bid farewell to Lorna and Charlotte, who left today for the mainland, and ultimately for Lorna, Edinburgh via Bangkok and London. Later on in the afternoon I realised that I probably didn’t have enough money to pay for the extra night plus all my drinks charges, so I considered returning to the mainland for some cash. It would have taken ages though, and eventually I managed to borrow a thousand baht from Steve. I couldn’t bring myslf to ask, but fortunately he offered.
-
Day 19
After breakfast we left the island for another, smaller one nearby. This turned out to be a picture-perfect, deserted, idylic tropical island, selected for its coral reef. Snorkling gear was produced, and we spent the morning gazing down at the coral formations and schools of fish. I was slightly disappointed by the reef, but it would be tough to beat the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. After a couple of hours a boatload of Thai tourists and a couple of property surveyors arrived and made our island a lot less deserted, although no less idyllic.
-
Day 18
Day 18 was a completely free day on the Gecko itinerary, but I had some pressing needs to attend to, such as finding something to wear on my feet. I walked over to the local village on the other side of the island with Lorna, with rope and shoes on my list. I needed the rope because I had bought a hammock in Sangkhlaburi that, as I discovered later, only had one piece of rope with it. The island had three major settlements. The one we left behind was the tourist village, spread out and fairly sparse. A path led across the island, through a big rubber plantation, and into the first of two local villages. This one was small, about the same size as the tourist village I would guess, although it was much more compact. Bits of old rope were lying about all over the place, but none were long enough for my hammock. I picked up a small fragment which I hoped might help me make my intentions understood when we finally found a shop. There were none in the first settlement, and we quickly left it behind, continuing on the path.
-
Day 17
Lorna called me at 7:30 so waking up in time turned out not to be such a problem after all. I finished packing quickly, putting everything I needed for our island stay into my day pack and one of the hotel’s laundry bags. My backpack would be left in Wizit’s office in Trang to be picked up on my way back to Bangkok. Our guide for the day picked us and all our island luggage up at nine and we drove to what was described in the Gecko itinerary as a sea gypsy village, but which, for our purposes, simply was the place where the boats were kept. With Sue and Steve sharing one canoe, and Lorna, Charlotte and I in the other, we set off for the mangrove swamps that lie near the coast. We were towed most of the way there, and then released to paddle through the mangroves. The boats were very unstable, so I didn’t take my camera.
-
Day 16
Steve wasn’t feeling well this morning so he and Sue stayed behind as Lorna and myself set off with Charlotte, and our brilliantly named guide, Wizit. We drove to a small village, and started walking into the jungle with a couple of Wizit’s younger cousins leading the way. The 11 year old was a walking machine – and he didn’t appear to require any rest. I suppose everyone’s like that when they’re eleven, especially if they have a tropical jungle on their doorstep. I gradually got used to the pace and managed to admire the scenery as we we trekked through streams and clamboured over rocks. The noise was deafening as insects making a chainsaw type sound screeched around us.
-
Day 15
I don’t know what time it was when everyone started stirring – I was certainly awake anyway. I asked Charlotte if she had managed to sleep. “Oh yeah”, she said, as if she’d never slept this well before in her entire life. The train eventually pulled into Trang station and we took a very overloaded tuktuk to the Trang Hotel. After lunch the next stop on the tour was the Thale Noi Bird Sanctuary, where we had several hours bird watching from a dragon boat that whizzed around lotus-covered lakes. About half an hour in, the birds were losing their appeal for me, though Steve and Sue were glued to their binoculars. I was more interested in the boat, which was able to skip over poles, ropes and nets at high speed thanks to it’s slender design and propeller that is several metres behind the boat itself.
-
Day 14
We had a free morning, but I woke up at 08:30 anyway, because next door were building something and clearly thought they should get an early start. Lorna decided to get a Thai massage, so the guesthouse manager arranged for a masseuse to come to her hut. I went off to check my email. The morning continued uneventfully, and after lunch we piled into the truck to drive to Nakhon Pathom, where our overnight train to Trang would depart, and made a stop on the way at our guide’s local temple – a brand new one but no less spectacular for it. It didn’t have any boundary stones, which I thought was interesting – most temples I’d seen so far had boundary markers: one stone for a normal temple, and pairs for royal temples. I had found them quite useful for working out where I needed to take my shoes off.
-
Day 13
I slept reasonably well despite there being essentially no difference between the mattress and the floor. We left at 08:30 for Hellfire Pass, which is a cutting through a rocky outcrop that was dug by POWs. The work continued night and day, and during the night flaming torches were used to illuminate the area, casting flickering shadows of malnourished prisoners on the grey rock. This led to the nickname ‘hellfire’. The museum on the site was excellent, with many well written and presented exhibits, a model of the railway, and a short video. It concentrated mostly on the Australian POWs, since the museum is financed by the Australian government. The pass itself is now devoid of any railway, and in fact has a big tree growing up from the floor of the cutting. Two kilometers from the hellfire pass, we reached the riverbank and launched the kayaks that we had brought with us. Initially I had a single one, until I realised that my arms obviously weren’t cut out for this sort of thing. I switched with Charlotte and got a spot in one of the doubles. The other occupant of my kayak was a guide who was really starting to get on my nerves by calling my name all the time for no apparent reason, and Lorna’s even more often.
-
Day 12
We took a local bus for the journey back to Kanchanaburi, which seemed to take a lot longer than the minibus had in the opposite direction. The bus was full, and even had a chicken on board. Accomodation in Kanchanaburi was huts built on stilts in the River Kwai – though they were not really in the river as such, since the water was not flowing past the huts, and a lot of algae and lilypads covered the water’s surface for the most part. Facilities had become one step more basic, with no hot water this time, and no toilet paper either! There was a waste pipe attached to the sink though. Lorna and I got separate rooms this time.
-
Day 11
Banana pancakes arrived as promised, and everyone agreed that they were much nicer than yesterday’s offering. A pickup truck arrived to take us to the start of our jungle trek. Charlotte managed to get the passenger seat, while the rest of us travelled cargo class. The drive was refreshing, though the guide seemed more interested in showing Charlotte his photo albums than in looking at the road, steering wheel or anything else normally indespensible to the task of driving a truck.