Eye of the Tiger

Instead of hopping onto a plane on Friday, Alby and I decided to ground ourselves and explore more of Bangkok. A co-worker had planned a day trip for Saturday and invited us to join him. So we woke up bright and early on Saturday morning to start our journey at 6:30am. Our first stop was the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market. Its about 2-2.5 hours of a drive out of Bangkok to get to the floating market, and the market pretty much is closed by 10am, so we had to leave early to get some time to shop and explore.

The floating market is just a unique experience. When we arrived, our guide hired us a boat to take us through the market itself. There are stores that are not along the canals, but that would be just like any regular market in Thailand. The canals were a Thai version of the canals in Venice..we were definitely not in Venice, but it was a interesting comparision. Our boat guide pretty much controled which shops we stopped at, and how long we were stuck at a store, you could tell there was some type of arrangement between the shopowners and the boat guides, because the places where were were not happy with the price but the shop keeper was trying to bargin, we would ask the driver to move on, but she would not budge, other times she would quickly move on. Barginning here was a must, but sometimes the shopowners would get upset if we undercut too much. Our coworker got scolded pretty bad by one shop owner because we think he stumbled upon the break even price for the store owner, and she was not happy that he wanted her to basically not make any money. The market no longer sells goods for the locals, its a tourist place, so you mostly get soveniers and handicrafts. Along the canals you could still buy fresh fruit and even stop for a bowl of hot noodle soup :) With our boat loaded with good shopping and "junk" shopping, we headed back to the loading area to continue our day trip.

By this point it was about 10:30am, our next stop would be Tiger Temple. Tiger Temple is a monestery in the northwest-ish part of Thailand (near the mountains that boarder with Burma). The temple is called Tiger Temple because the monks here have been rescuing and raising the local tigers. The tigers now live in the monestery, many roaming free with the monks. Our guide wanted to get us to the temple before 1pm, so that we could play with the baby tigers, since at 1, the young tigers are put away to rest, and the adult tigers are moved to a Canyon area that is cooler, and people can take pictures with them. The little baby tigers were super cute. They played with each other and the crew at the temple just like little kittens would. We got a few good pictures, and even one with us walking with the tiger as he moved to the cooler canyon.

After Tiger Temple, we drove down to the city Kanchanaburi located on the River Kwai where we had lunch at a local place overlooking the river. Lunch was interesting to say the least...don't think we are really into the local thai dishes. The River Kwai area is famous for the Bridge over the River Kwai, the start of the infamous World War II Death Railway to Burma (Myanmar).