It’s the second day of the tour and I’m in a little village a long way from Bangkok. The first part of the tour started with a few hours of sightseeing in Bangkok, all of which I’ve seen before. So although I went with the group, I can honestly say that I wasn’t too interested in seeing the sites. Later, about 5, we left to catch a train for a small(er) city south. Since the journey was going to take us about 13 hours we got a sleeper car to pass the night. It hasn’t been the first time that I have been in a sleeper, but this one was a little bit different than any I’ve been in before. Instead of being in a cabin with four or six beds, this sleeper had two beds next to the aisle, no cabin. It was a little bit strange but I like strange sometimes.
After arriving at our hotel in Khaosok (about two hours away from the train station), I was finally able to take a shower. The place that I have is really nice, it’s a bungalow hidden in the jungle, right above a river. I am really impressed with the bungalow too. Since I’m the only male by myself on the tour I get the room to myself, and for where it is at (in what seems the middle of the jungle) it really seems nice. At least it has hot water for showers. There are monkeys hanging around and all sorts of other animals like lizards too. Really is a nice place
Later this afternoon, in fact in about twenty minutes we are heading out to canoe down the river, which river I don’t know, but it should be fun.
Just a note, I’m writing this about three days after I went on the canoe trip. The last few days have been moving really fast, and even now as I write this I don’t know if I’ll have enough time to catch up on all of the days and things that I’ve done since the last entry. I’ll try though.
The canoeing trip was really fun. It wasn’t anything like I had expected, first we were passengers and not rowing. I didn’t like the idea of that at first, since I’ve always been the type of guy who wants to row, or drive, or do my own physical thing, but I have to say that in the end, I did enjoy just letting the river go by as I leaned back and relaxed. Not a lot of interesting things happened that I can talk about, but it was fun. We saw a couple of snakes in the canopy above the river, and there was one point in front of a temple that fish would gather and wait for the boaters to feed them. Supposedly that was the only place on the river that the fish were safe and they knew it, so they stayed there. They were so thick and so eager to get the food that they actually jumped into one of the boats. Unfortunately not mine, but at least two other canoes. We also stopped for some swimming but I wasn’t in the mood. The water was really moving fast and it was also very dirty, so I chose to just hang out with the other people that didn’t swim and drink coffee.
