Sugar Cane 2, Kanchanaburi

Sugar Cane is a pleasant mostly quiet place on the riverside about 10 minutes walk from the Bridge. I say mostly because the karaoke and party boats do ply the river from town to the bridge, passing the guesthouse. These are largely amusing diversions. However, we were in Kanchancaburi during the Bridge Week, which means many more boat-fulls of partying Thais and Farangs each night. There was also a lot of volume coming over from the fairground stage until about 1am. None of this really disturbed us though.

The guesthouse riverside platform. Great for morning yoga, afternoon sunsets and evening fireworks!

The little rooms with fan and bathroom were 200 baht a night and decent enough. The walls could have been cleaned, especially of the ancient splashes of toothpaste above the basin. The restaurant was good. The owner was very nice and four teenage girls, two organised and friendly, two pretty feckless, ran the place. A really nice guy was there for overnight security too. The girls even waved us off as we left.

Though the rooms are pretty small, and in that no smaller than most backpacker standard rooms or bungalows, they are en-suite which makes a difference for a longish visit. The guesthouse is arranged around a rectangular space which is part garden but mostly a gravel parking area. The Bamboo House, closer to the Bridge, has a much nicer and well-planned garden. The river-view restaurant produces good Thai food at reasonable prices and there is a metal platform over the river with a view of sunset and the Bridge. We saw the nearing of the moon, Venus and Jupiter from this platform in advance of the Sky Smile on the 1^st December.

Skewered to Eat

Skewered to Eat
Originally uploaded by Bill Bevan

Wanting Quails’ Egg Wantons

My latest Thai food craze is Quials’ egg wantons. We first discovered them in Kanchanaburi on the many fried food street vendors stalls. Most of the time when walking down street lined with food vendors there is no point in us looking at them. Invariably everything is meat or fish. Skewer of five or six fat-coated pork balls are a ubiquitous Thai delicacy. As are squares of processed fish that on first glance looks temptingly like tofu. Delicious wanton parcels hide chicken and pork, again. Less attractive are slashed shiny hot dogs. All are served dipped in pots of various chilli sauces, some with fish and prawns, others light and dark red sweet chilli. Racks and rack of skewers shove food in your face of no use to the vegetarian because of the three commandments of Thai food – thou shall eat chicken, fish and pork.

The thing is, we would really love to be able to join in the Thai love for grazing skewered snacks with chilli sauce. Vegetable spring rolls are a rarity mostly confined to tourist ghettos and tempura is totally absent from the streets. The discovery that some of the yellow crispy rice batter of wantons concealed quails’ eggs was like waking up on Christmas Day to discover that amongst all those presents with other peoples’ names on were some for you after all. We could join in the party at last!

I have never had quails eggs in Britain. A bit too much of a costly luxury. But at 10 baht for a skewer of five, which works out at about 20 pence given the plummeting pound, it was time to discover and indulge, which did mean overlooking the living conditions of the quails. I'm usually very strict to only have free range organic eggs in the UK except when going out for the occasional fried breakfast.

And yes, I did want the hot chilli sauce please, despite being a farang. Darker and hotter the better.

Kayak Down the River Kwai

After enjoying our canoe journey down the River Macal in Belize last year, in fact juat about the same time last year, we decided to do the same down the Kwai. We hired a two-person kayak from Safarine, one of three tour companies offering kayak trips and rentals in Kanchanaburi. We mainly went with them because a, they were closest to our guest house and b, we had been recommended them by four lively retired Poles who we had met the first weekend in town when they reached shore at our guesthouse after a 400km journey down the River. The four men with huge appetites for alcohol, food and conversation after living on rations and with their own company for 12 days all live in Melbourne. We decided on something a bit more manageable. We were dropped off about 12km upstream at 11am and told to land the kayak at the Chinese Temple. The Safarine guide estimated it would take us about 3 hours.

The Kwai is not sluggish but we were paddling into a head wind which meant that at times we had to make something of an effort. Mostly, it was very plain going and was no where as strenuous as canoeing the shingle shallows and still deeps of the Macal. We passed between woodland, bamboo, fields as well as some very top-end luxury river resorts and architect-designed private houses. The River Kwai is clearly a play ground for the better off of Thai society.


A floating karaoke bar

After about two hours we were beginning to flag. We realised that out chances of finding a place to pull in and have lunch were diminished by most of the resorts being curiously closed. No sign of life emanated across manicured lawns or from tethered floating restaurants. Each place we passed was as quiet as a holiday resort in mindwinter, despite December being the start of the dry season and our trip taking place on a Friday which was the King’s Birthday and therefore a public holiday. Kanchanaburi had filled over the previous night with young Thais making the most of a long weekend. Upstream and upmarket was all empty hotels and proverbial tumbleweed.

We then spotted movement on one set of floating restaurants and made straight for it, hoping it was sign of life. Then we saw the sign – the Duneshine. This was Kanchanaburi’s longest established luxury resort, one we had passed the week before on bicycles and had been entertained by their brightly lit floating restaurants passing our guesthouse on weekend evenings. Our eyes lit up as we pulled the kayak on to the river bank, walked through the landscaped grounds and discovered their was restaurant was open. Glass noodle salad and noodles wrapped in an omelette refreshed us for what we knew now to be the last few kilometres back to Kanchanaburi.





We passed below the Bridge Over the River Kwai within the hour, drifted past our guesthouse like the many karaoke boats had done every night and spotted the distinctive pagoda of the Chines Temple above the trees. Our micro adventurette was over, during which we had treat ourselves to a good lunch at a luxury hotel.


Chinese Temple to starboard bow

Wat Tham is Love?

Wat Tham Khao Noi?

This may sound like a question but it is, infact, the name of one of two twin hilltop temples just south of Kanchanaburi that we visited on Monday 24th November. We took a bus out of the central bus station to a junction near a dam then got on the back of two motorcycle taxis over the dam wall for the 6km ride to the base of the hill.

As we motored along, I sped while Georgia’s driver took it more slowly for her and the bump, I looked up for the hill and its temples. The only hills I could see where miles away and devoid of any roofs, prangs or chedis. I began to think we must be heading the wrong way, abducted by highwaymen motorcycle taxi drivers taking us deep into woodland to bag our wallets. The photos I had seen of the temples showed three pagodas crowning a steep wooded mountain top that clearly towered over the surrounding land. The guide books talked of a funicular railway to take pilgrims and tourists to the top.

The road took turns in alternate directions. The hills were not visibly getting any nearer so clearly they were more than 6km away. Then, after one final turn to the left the pagodas came into view, barely rising above the nearest banana plantation. What in my expectation had been a cloud-scraping mountain turned out to be a much less lofty hill, one that could easily be at home in Norfolk. We were delivered to the base of the protuberance right at the start of the not-much-larger-than-toy-sized funicular, a track of not more than 100 metres on which ran two silver ‘carriages’ with enough space to take maybe four or five families. We succumbed, shunning the short flight of steps next door for a 10 baht, 10 second shudder up the escarpment and on to the plateau.





The two temples are one Thai Buddhist and one Chinese Buddhist. The Thai temple - Tham Khao Noi - has a giant, golden mosaic-covered Buddha that sits within a flame shaped canopy next to red-roofed temple halls and two orange pagodas tapering to golden points. No surface is left unpainted, ungilded or devoid of a twist or turn of some form of architectural embellishment. Each pagoda contains numerous Buddha statues in window niches on seven dark floors. The small windows allow in only narrow shafts or light that are hardly augmented by strip lighting. Sometimes two or three Buddhas are stuffed into a niche or a larger group are deposited seemingly randomly on a table. The views down onto the other temple buildings and across vivid green rice paddies to distant wooded hills are those of built and natural tranquillity.





But all the time there is another presence looming. This is the Chinese pagoda of Wat Tham Suew next door. Totally different in style, the hexagonal, vertical-walled pagoda is seven floors of large, flat pastel colours, each floor under a sloping tiled roof so archetypical of Chinese style. Buddha statues could be glimpsed silhouetted in the doors. Inside, a single Buddha statue occupies the centre of each floor and the feeling is of natural light, open, uncluttered spaces that are freshened by gentle breezes. Outside the ornate clutter of the Thai pagodas make architecturally wrought attention-grabbing stratagems less anyone dwells too much within the Chinese pagoda.







The way up to the Chinese pagoda is not gifted with a funicular, but instead is a series of Escher-like stairways and walkways threading through a number of temples complete with Chinese statues of characters that clearly evoke thought-provoking stories on ways of living. Inside the pagoda, the walls are decked with thousands of tiles, each with a small Buddha image. As we descended back to terra firma we heard chanting and a bell from one of these and saw a lone orange-robed monk praying before one of the Buddhas. The long decay of the bell and the sonorous chant held peace in the air.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Poon

Descending through the bowels of the earth.


Buddha in a Cave

We visited one of the many caves in this limestone region of Kanchanaburi. The karst limestone forms teeth-like hills above ground, while below are found tunnels and chambers that prompts the idea that this is what it must be like to travel inside bowels and spines. Some of the caves are used as temples, others have more harrowing histories as Japanese World War 2 POW camps.

We visited Wat Khao Poon, a temple to Buddha and Ganesha and once a Japanese field hospital. After clambering down a flight of steep steps we came into a large, brightly-lit and roomy chamber with statues of the reclining Buddha and the rotund Chinese smiling Buddha. Beyond this is where the fun begins. Snaking and ducking along a series of narrow passages, brings us to one chamber after another. Each passage creeps further and further down into the ground, through broken and weathered limestone that looms into view as angular and bulbous formations akin to bones and bodily organs. Thankfully, very few of the walls ooze dampness.


Mighty Ceiling Stalactites

Large fossilised waterfalls spring into each passage and chamber in the form of massive stalactites and stalagmites that cascade from roof to floor in absolute stillness. Some stalactites are ridged into furrows and fins, while others look like petrified ripples on a beach. Some form columns while others flow over the limestone corners and curves. In places, the stillness is broken by a gentle drip of water, showing that the processes of stalactite formation are still busy. Everything else is motionless - apart from us. The pale blue grey whiteness of the limestone is devoid of any colour energy; the warm fetid air is immobile while no sound echoes come back from footfall. But we keep descending; down, down, down between the rock.


Ganesha

This lack of movement, in many ways, makes Wat Khao Poon a perfect place for meditation. Perhaps it is this, and a veneration of natural elements, that brought people to worship down here centuries ago. Each chamber is a temple or shrine. As we clamber through each opening we find statues of the Buddha, Brahma, Shiva and Ganesha set against the background of bent limestone and ribbed stalactites. Some images are dark, others golden, but most are draped in bright orange cloths. They are accompanied by dying flowers and burnt incense, while surfaces are covered in small squares of gold leaf. Each is a testament to an unseen act of worship.


Laughing Buddha

Eventually we begin to climb, the turn in direction coming after the largest chamber with the largest Buddha statue. The air begins to turn a little fresher and at last the white fluorescence of the artificial lights give way to a warmer hue. We look up to see an opening, beyond which the green leaves and branches of a tree striate the blue sky. We return above ground, leaving the underworld once more in peace.