Author: Oli

We crossed Thailand twice on our route through Southeast Asia. On the first, we entered Thailand from Cambodia and headed straight for Bangkok’s Chinatown. We then turned north towards the lovely border town of Nong Khai and crossed into Laos.

On our second stint through Thailand, we crossed the Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge at Huay Xai and ate our way through Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai. We then took a sleeper train south back to Bangkok, this time staying in the bustling Sukhumvit area. After a brief diversion to the Death Railway at Kanchanaburi, we continued south through the delightful seaside town of Prachuap Khiri Khan, and finally ended up on the desert island paradise of Ko Adang.

We wouldn’t normally have rushed through northern Thailand so quickly, but we’d read about how poor the air quality can be at this time of year. While we were actually very lucky with our timing and didn’t experience severe haze, the air quality in Chiang Rai has since risen to 125 times the limit deemed safe by the World Health Organisation. We really feel for the people who live there.

Carbon 🚆

Our travel through Thailand emitted 306 kgCO2e. Excluding flights, this is our second highest carbon emissions within a country to date (after Kazakhstan), although we did cover a grand total of 3,716 km mostly by train during our two transits across Thailand. That’s more than 2.5 times the distance from Land’s End to John o’ Groats!

Cost 💰

Thailand turned out to be the second most affordable country we’ve visited, just behind Georgia. To be fair though, we did travel more than three times the distance in Thailand as we did in Georgia over a similar period of time, which explains why our transport expenditure was so much higher in Thailand. In contrast, we saved money on transport but spent it on cheese in Georgia…

Cats 🐈 (and other wildlife 🐾)

Thailand scored fourth on our cats-per-day metric, just behind Cambodia. We were a little disappointed at Thailand’s final tally of 8.26 as it got off to a very strong start and looked like it might rival Turkey, but the lack of any cats on Ko Adang certainly hurt the grand total.

As well as Thailand’s strong crop of cats, we also came across some other pretty cool wildlife who deserved some serious recognition…

🏅Most fabulous lizard

Lizards are everywhere in Southeast Asia, but this chap’s colouring was on another level. I like to think he was conflicted about whether to blend in or stand out against his surroundings.

🏅Squadron leader, orange corps

We met this lovely chap on the military base in Prachuap Khiri Khan. He was conducting a lunchtime food inspection but was so spoilt for choice that he turned his nose up at the chicken skin Sara offered to him and instead climbed onto one of our neighbours’ laps, where he received a generous helping of prawns!

🏅Best coordinated tug of war

Ants are so impressive. Not only are the 12 ants below carrying what appears to be a chicken bone between them, but they’re carrying it straight up a vertical wall! 🤯

🏅Snappiest dresser at the night market

We met the chap below on the promenade in Nong Khai, and unsurprisingly we weren’t the only ones stopping to admire his furry bowtie. He seemed totally at ease with the crowds, and also didn’t seem bothered about being walked on a lead.

🏅Friendliest station master

And last but not least, this chap absolutely stole Sara’s heart. After sharing some of our fellow passengers’ rice, he strolled over and lay down next to us while we waited for our train at Nakhon Pathom. He didn’t even flinch when a huge goods train thundered past honking its horn. I guess this was just another Sunday afternoon for him.

Food 🌶

Thailand certainly didn’t disappoint on its food, although we’ve probably raved enough already about what we ate during our 19 days in the country.

Our one issue is that while it is well known for its spicy food and we also love a chilli or two, we consistently struggled to explain how hot we wanted our food – basically we wanted to eat the original version of the dish, without any chilli added or taken away. Many restaurants suggested we take the food “medium spicy”, which on the face of it sounds like a good call, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that some dishes had been watered down to suit Farang tastes and often ended up too mild for our liking. We also tried “as you would have it”, though I think that was just too subjective. Our struggles reminded me of a spice scale we once saw in a restaurant that had Athens at the mild end, London in the middle, and Delhi at the spicy end. This is what we needed!

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The UK FCDO currently advises against all but essential travel through much of the area north of the Thailand-Malaysia land border. This left us in a bit of a predicament, as it ruled out both rail crossings and most road crossings between the two counties. That was until Sara came across a ferry connection between the Thai island of Ko Lipe and the Malaysian island of Langkawi, both of which we were excited to visit. Phew!

Today, Kanchanaburi sits close to the end of the train line west of Bangkok, but during the Second World War it briefly connected Thailand to Burma (now Myanmar). So poor were the workers’ conditions that tragically more than 100,000 prisoners of war and civilians lost their lives during its construction, and thus this line became known as the Death Railway.

We took an early morning taxi across Bangkok to the old Thonburi station to meet up with the 07:50 train to Kanchanaburi. Travelling by rail was definitely slower than road, but it would have felt wrong to take the bus on a route with such historical significance.

Shortly after arriving in Kanchanaburi, we set off on an afternoon excursion to Hellfire Pass – a cutting through the rock necessary to avoid steep inclines on the railway. To get here, we first headed to the bus station, only to find out the (supposedly hourly) bus wasn’t for an hour and ten minutes, and as we sat there waiting in the baking heat, we discussed our hopes that this wasn’t going to turn into another disastrously-rushed trip like in Alerverdi, Armenia. Progress was slow when we finally began our 87 km journey towards Hellfire Pass, and I could see that we were getting further and further behind schedule. As we chugged along, Sara pointed at a few guesthouses and remarked that at least we’d have somewhere to stay the night if we missed the last bus home, and I could tell she was only half joking.

Arriving at Hellfire Pass, we were met straight off the bus by a chap who worked for the Office of Australian War Graves. As kind and helpful as he was, he couldn’t stop the museum from closing in fifteen minutes time, so he suggested (in the nicest possible way) that we get a move on. On top of that, he recommended that we were back at the bus stop in good time if we didn’t want to miss the last bus back to Kanchanaburi (which he explained was highly unpredictable and could arrive any time between in one and three hours’ time). To be on the safe side, this gave us a whole 45 minutes to explore the rest of the site!

At the museum, we learned the reason why it was nicknamed “Hellfire Pass”. One of the prisoners of war likened the view from the top of the cutting at night to something from Dante’s Inferno – with fires burning at intervals of 20 feet and shadows of forced labour moving through the darkness. Beyond the museum, we continued down some wooden steps onto the pass itself. The views from the pass across the mountains were stunning, which made it almost impossible to imagine how miserable it must have been to work on the railway. It was only once we continued along the pass and through the cutting that the scale of the operation became clear, having just learned about the basic tools that were available to create such a path through the mountain.

Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for the nearby guesthouses), we made it back to the bus stop in time for the last bus back to Kanchanaburi. At this point we were feeling like intrepid explorers who were very far from home, before meeting a chap at the bus stop from Weymouth, Dorset. Small world, as they say!

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The following day, we (more sensibly) spent the morning in Kanchanaburi, visiting its famous bridge and a couple of museums. The town’s rail bridge spans a nearby river, which was made famous by the book and subsequent film The Bridge on the River Kwai. However, there’s only one catch – this was the bridge, but this wasn’t the River Kwai. But after the success of said movie, tourists began the turn up in town looking for the River Kwai, so the Thai authorities ingeniously renamed the river in an effort to meet visitors’ expectations.

Sadly, the bridge’s tragic history didn’t end with its construction. In 1945, when news came that a bombing raid on the bridge was imminent, the occupying Japanese forces sent hundreds of prisoners of war out to line the bridge, ostensibly to prevent the raid. The tactic didn’t work, and the allied bomb destroyed the middle section of the bridge, and many more prisoners of war met their end here.

We returned to our guesthouse to find a concerned member of staff who called out to us even as we were still in the road: “Oliver, why you miss breakfast?!” I mean, she had a point – we’d paid for breakfast when we booked the room but since completely forgotten. Still, they were very kind not just to notice, but also to keep the breakfast out for long enough for us to enjoy a snack after our morning outing.

Our final stop in Kanchanaburi was the excellent Death Railway Museum, which really helped put everything we’d seen into context. We learned that while around 12,000 Allied prisoners lost their lives during the railway’s construction, a further 90,000 Asian labourers were also killed, most of whom were not recorded and left no surviving accounts. The working conditions for all workers were awful, but we learned about some of the factors that affected the survival rates in different camps, such as proximity to a clean water source, distance between the camp and work site, and the existence of effective administration on both the Japanese and prisoner of war sides. The museum sought to explain the reasons behind the brutal treatment of the railway workers, which worsened over time as the the Japanese chain of command put more and more pressure on those supervising the construction of the railway. It was no surprise that progress was slower than the schedule set by those in command, since the original inspection party of Japanese engineers had told their commanders that the topography was not suitable for a railway, but had been ordered to begin work regardless.

The museum also described how much of this information was learned via secret diaries and photographs that were buried with the dead, which were found later when their bodies were exhumed after the war. Most crushing of all, we learned how some prisoners of war felt ambivalent when the war finally came to an end, and struggled to return to previous relationships and careers as a result of their mental or physical condition.

British forces dismantled part of the railway connecting the two countries following the war, returning equipment and supplies to the countries from where they had originated. The remaining assets were sold to Thailand, with the warning that the railway track was incomplete. However, the Thai Minister of Communications somehow missed this memo, and his inspection party’s train hurtled into a ravine where a bridge had once stood. The minister died soon after the incident, and thus ended the use of the Death Railway with one final tragedy.

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After just a single night in Kanchanaburi, we continued our journey south towards the seaside town of Prachuap Khiri Khan.

We returned to Bangkok via another overnight sleeper train, which rather inconveniently deposited us a couple hours late in the middle of Bangkok’s morning rush hour. Still, we decided to take our chances with the metro, but had to watch one train come and go with only a few people managing to get on each carriage, before the holy grail of an empty train pulled up, much to our disbelief. Despite this, it wasn’t long before the carriage was packed out again, and I really felt for Sara who wasn’t feeling quite the ticket after a rough night on the train.

This time we were staying in Sukhumvit, a high-rise district famous for its international hotels, shopping malls, bars and restaurants. The main roads were wide, loud and often in the shadows of the SkyTrain overhead. On top of this, the streets were busy with people from all over the world, giving the area a very different feel to our first stay in Bangkok’s Chinatown.

After Sara had spent a full 24 hours in bed recovering from her mystery train illness, she was ready to venture out to Benjakitti Park, a huge natural area which used to house parts of the Tobacco Authority of Thailand. As often seems to happen, we hit the park in the heat of the day, which felt borderline oppressive. In fact, we didn’t get far at all before we slumped onto a shady bench for a rest and refreshment, and waited for the temperature to cool slightly. We enjoyed traversing the park via a number of raised walkways, which took us over a large area of wetlands with the high rise of the city visible at every turn.

The next day, we visited the Jim Thompson House, a museum dedicated to an American man who had emigrated to Thailand after the Second World War. Thompson seemed to have had quite the privileged upbringing, and at various points pursued careers as an architect, costume designer and Lieutenant Colonel in the Office for Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA) during the war. It was this last role that had brought him to Thailand, where he became enchanted by the silk weavers of Bangkok. After the war, he bought a number of traditional teak houses on stilts and had them moved to a plot of land just across the canal from the silk weavers, where he joined them together to form his own design.

He went on to found a hugely successful international silk business, which exported fabric to high-profile designers in Europe and the USA. However, it all came to an abrupt end when Thompson vanished while visiting a friend on vacation to Malaysia in 1967, at the age of 61. To this day, Thompson’s disappearance remains a mystery, with theories ranging from getting lost in the forest to being kidnapped by enemies of the CIA. Seven years after his disappearance, Thompson was assumed dead, and his house preserved as a museum by a trust set up by his family. The house itself was beautiful, and we found Thomson’s life fascinating, if a little sad.

We rounded off our second visit to Bangkok with a trip to the city’s highest rooftop, which sits proudly atop the King Power Mahanakhon. We weren’t allowed to bring food or drink up to the rooftop so we diligently placed our snacks into a locker, once again completely forgetting about our penknife and picnic cutlery set. The security team were a lot more forgiving than the surly chap at Yerevan Airport, and they promised to return the items after our visit to the rooftop. This is now the fourth time they’ve nearly been confiscated on this trip, but they live to fight another day!

With security screening behind us, the panoramic views from the rooftop were spectacular, and it finally gave us a bit of perspective on the size of Bangkok. From here, Bangkok looked way larger than I had imagined, and I couldn’t quite believe it had taken us this long to find a reason to visit. The rooftop turned out to be another popular sunset spot, but we managed to nab ourselves some space on the front row of the top floor moments before the the sun dipped below the skyscrapers.

Just before taking the lift back down, we spotted the “skywalk”, which allows visitors to walk over a glass floor protruding from the building. Sara was already feeling a little queasy just standing on the rooftop proper, so figured what difference was a glass floor going to make? In reality I’m not sure she looked down at all, but it did make for a great photo opportunity.

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Having enjoyed the comforts of city life for a few days, we decided to squeeze in a short trip to Kanchanaburi. Today, this town lies close to the end of the railway line west of Bangkok, although during the Second World War it sat on the infamous Death Railway connecting Thailand and Burma.