Days 3 and 4

So you may have noticed that I skipped a day when writing this. That's simply because we actually pretty much skipped a full day ourselves anyway. Tuesday was spent mostly in bed, both of us sleeping in until 3pm. The highlights of the day being a Big Mac meal each, and a visit to Terminal 21 shopping centre to test the exquisite toilets. It is my intention to write this blog as often as possible, and to provide full updates on how this trip goes, but I won't bore you with a few inches of nonsense on days where little happens.

In stark contrast to Tuesday, Wednesday was probably one of the best days we're going to experience on this trip. For my birthday this year, Josephine and my friends bought me an elephant riding experience with Bangkok Day Tours. The trip was a full day set out, beginning with a drive to the floating markets of Bangkok, then on to the bridge on the the river Kwai, before finally going to the elephant camp to ride an elephant, and play with one in the river.

Probably because we slept all day on Tuesday, we couldn't actually get any sleep on Tuesday night, so we watched a film instead, before finally going down for breakfast half an hour early at 6.30am. The hotel staff were extremely accommodating and swiftly set up the breakfast selection early just for us. More and more I'm noticing this in Thailand. The sign may say open from 7, but if you get there early and you need something before then – they'll help you. Anyway, Mr Somchai our personal driver for the day arrived early, and waited in the lobby for us to finish our breakfast, before setting off for the first leg of our trip – the floating markets.

This market was unreal. It made the the old Grey Mare Lane market in Manchester look like the Trafford Centre in terms of cleanliness, but you could buy almost anything there. You get on a little narrow boat, with a guy paddling you around the market for half an hour whilst you say no to literally every vendor there. They try to force bags of saffron, magnets and wine bottle holders into your hand, and hold on to the boat as you pass so you can't get away. It's an experience bartering with them to bring the prices of things down though, and it's worth buying a few things just for this.

So when we left we drove to pick up our tour guide for the bridge, and the elephants. A local woman girl called Na who spoke excellent English and gave us plenty of history of the area along the way. She also took a million photos of us, and made us get into some snide positions for them, but it's all part of the fun. When we got to the bridge, we walked across it, and saw a piece of history that was immortalised by the Alec Guiness film of the late 50s which is still in use today. A train actually crossed the bridge just after we got off it. It's estimated that upto 113,000 people died during the construction of the Siamese-Burmese rail connection which includes this bridge. 13,000 of which were Western prisoners of war, and the remainder being made up of forced labour from Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies. It's quite a sombre part of the day, but something I'm glad we could experience.

Then on to the Elephants. The main attraction. Let me just start out by saying that I'm no Captain Planet. I'm the kinda guy that leaves the tap on whilst I brush my teeth, and the lights on when I leave a room. I'm not saving the world, and I'm not really one for worrying too much about these things, but being with these animals made me think a little bit about it. These are wild animals that have been trained to perform a certain way for humans. There's probably an element of cruelty to their training, but there's also a lot of respect and caring given to them by the trainers. We got to ride an elephant each into the river, where they threw us around and squirted us with water as we bathed them. Then we got to share a ride around the camp and briefly into the jungle. It's an experience I'll never forget, and one that will probably be one of the highlights of this trip.

The journey back to Bangkok was just over 3 hours long, and we slept most of the way. Na woke us up to say goodbye as we dropped her off, but she was furious when we only tipped her 120 baht. She didn't even say thank you. Once back, we washed and changed and went out for a nice curry and a few drinks around Soi 11 before Skyping our mothers and bed with a bottle of chocolate milk. Tomorrow we get to go and feed crocodiles and go to one of the biggest knock off markets in the world. Excellent.