Life Behind The Thunderdome: 01/02/14

Continuing riding north, on our amazing highway we soon reached town of Thong Pha Phum, a small place stretching along a turn off the main road, it's famous for land crabs apparently and a big statues in the middle of the main drag stand as proof of it.

Crazy hills surrounding town.

We found a great, falling apart, bungalow in the parking lot of a hotel. Everything around it was concrete turning the afternoons into roasting experiences, but we really enjoyed passing time under the fresh common area eating the best deep fried bananas i have ever had (do i say this all the times??!!), beside a variety of Burmese delicacy sold at the busy morning market. We even founded a vegetarian restaurant!

Dodgy bungalows in the cement field.

Big part of the population in northern Kanchanaburi is actually from Burma, refugees or workers brought over for the construction of the dam, man sarongs and white painted faces of kids and women's were an everyday sight.
Everybody in town was very friendly and it only took a few hours before we made friend with the family at the shop in front of the hotel, were we stopped for coffee.
Songkran, Buddhist new year, was about to start and we could notice an incrising amount of cars passing by town buying food enough to survive a month, before continuing further north where floating accommodation is the big thing to do.
The celebrations lasts three days consists into gently pouring water over other peoples as a sine of appreciation, the families gather in the morning and the elderly are the firsts to get wet by their sons, then everyone gather at the temple where rituals take places and people pour water over a Buddha statue. The afternoons are a bit different, kids stands along the road trowing buckets of water, basically to anything that moves While the adults get waisted. Another popular thing is painting peoples faces white with a mixture of flower and water. Both thing stands as a sign of purity.

Our favourite hanging out spot, the flooded square.

So, its very hard to stay dry and nobody is spared, usually the day end with a fair, food and music. It is very hard to stay sober because the locals are very keen to make you join their party, it happened to me before.Sound pretty fun doesn' t it?
Well, try to be in a big touristic destination for it and you will easily change your mind! Some places the water throwing get so aggressive that it makes me feel forced to be indoor to avoid insulting someone! This is one of the reasons why we chose to be in Kanchanaburi.

Swimming in the river kway

And of course staffing the face, after all those kilometers!!

Songkran party poster, all the stars are gonna be there!!

After a couple of days of rest , first day of songkran, we moved further up north to the district and town of Sangklaburi, another amazing road, which turned out to be very hard because of humidity and steepness.

On top of the dam. What an apocalyptic structure!!

And what a view!

Finally the monsoon got us!!!

At first we rolled up and down and in and out the hills along the dam, each one of the hills had his own climate, fist humid, then fresh then burning hot under the sun, it was really demanding to push trough and it felt even hard to push the oxygen down your lungs.

The last crazy hills of the trip,

Fortunately we where very well prepared with sticky rice and coconut sweets!

To top the whole thing up we had 3 killer hills just before town where we had to push hard to get on top and hold our brakes just as hard to get down, the last one of them has been a crazy experience, to avoid people to take over they caged one lane of the road with guard rails making the road so narrow it gave the feeling we could hit them any time.
Apparently town was a very well busy touristic destination for Thais, and it was kind of hard to find a place to sleep, beside being pretty pricey compared to normal.

Floating village along the dam

We manage to get a room with view on the dam and really wanted to go for a swim, just needed to find a nice spot. The owner of the place told us is not really a good idea to swim in it because the water is very dirty, many of the floating houses don't really have a drain ,your waste just go straight into the water, and it get really stinky during dry season because the water is low and very steady. It confirmed it the fact that none of the locals where in the dam, but the rest of the tourist from resorts gardens and floating houses where jumping right in it!

Our guest house cramped on a slope,
but with a great view

Sangklaburi

We thought then to follow a secondary road along the water to try to find a lonely spot but we actually found the contrary, seems like every land lord with access to the dam has a few floating houses to rent to tourists as an extra income, the trash level increased inside and outside the water, making the whole "hunt for a swim" less and less appealing.