Songkran, happy new year once again!

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.

The Hmong bridge in sangklaburi, connecting town to a  small village

Burmese speciality, rice and coconut pancake, could eat a million!!!

More Burmese speciality....

which i can stuff down my head hole!!!!

Last stop at the last national park on our route

                                               

Lara Croft in action

What more to say... From here on the only option we had left was to turn back and ride right to Bangkok.

Kanchanaburi

I must say we have been pretty lucky with our choice, we where just looking for a route to make time to get to Bangkok and visit some nice places along the way and look where we ended up! Not following a guide book makes things more unexpected, we heard about the area before and searched informations about it on other cycling blogs but really we didn't know what we would found.
We left Sri Sawat pretty fast because, really, there was nothing to admire in town beside the dam, we met some seriously d.i.y. french cyclists at the small restaurant, going opposite direction and exchanged informations about the road ahead. They had a really interesting set up, random Asian mountain bikes, all painted blue and white, handle grips, chains and tyres included with their little backpacks tight on the racks, only few clothes in it. Of course they had to sleep in guest houses and  rely on restaurants for food.
They told us about their previous killer day and we told them about ours,seemed like a loose-loose  today for both the teams.

At least we knew we could cheat because we read on the Internet about a ferry some kilometers out of town which was gonna make us skip some 20 kilometers through the mountains, also, our lousy breakfast didn't exactly gave us any energy to face the climb.

Going to the ferry was the right choice, the turn off came earlier than expected, no signs for it,of course, but made noticeable by a fare amount of cars coming up from a pretty small secondary road off the main one. The road brought us gently to the pier, riding along the water of the beautiful Sinakharin dam and its many floating houses forming whole villages wherever there is an accessible way to the main land.

The pier , what a great spot could had stayed here for a week.

This time the journey was straight forward, compared to our previous dam crossing experience, a huge steal construction consisting of a platform and two truck engines (one to go forward the other one to go backwards) came by right away packed with cars coming from the other side, it was Sunday so many tourist take the drive to visit the spot.
The ferry really sorted us out, there was an old lady on board selling steamed bananas and sticky rice and we sat on the passenger wooden platforms which really reminded of a bus stop and had our second breakfast, what a pity the journey lasted so short!

On the ferry, you can see on the top right the driving spot.

And us having second breakfast.

A few more kilometers up and down those amazing hills and we reached Erawan Natinal Park where we decided to stop for a day, visit the waterfall and soak in fresh mountain water holes. The park was a very comfortable experience, had cheap food stall open all day just outside the gate and even a market in town, one kilometer up the hill. We really enjoyed our stay especially after those past days of "rough" riding.
Of course the park wasn't what we expected hundred percent, us in the jungle with beautiful waterfall just for yourself; hordes of Russian tourist flooded the place every day, we couldn't find out why there where Russians only, maybe some package deal from home.

Once again, up and down the hills.

Firs sight of the river Kway

Getting to the camp spot at Erawan National Park, not a solid bridge!

The pools in the waterfalls got pretty busy during the day and it was kind of funny admiring this people in their 80's swimmers and tiny bikinis smoking cigarettes and drinking Ron while posing in the most absurd ways under the falling stream, dudette, not sure u noticed but you are not on a celebrity magazine! Beside that a huge sign at the entrance asked to respect the culture and bate in shorts and t-shirt, not smoke and don't drink alchol in the park. Well the locals for sure where having a good laugh and the rangers doing an amazing job keeping the place clean and collecting cigarettes butts.
In this amazing and surreal place we sat for a while, small fishes in the water eat the dead skin off our body like in a SPA in Bangkok,(i would have never imagined that it really happened in nature) and two days flew by.

Some of the pools at the waterfalls.

There is 7 of them but we only visited four

It's actually quite a challenge to take a good shot...without Russians in it i mean.

Of course, the best time to take a picture of camp is just when you are done packing.

Our next destination was the next national park, just one day away, to have another little break and hang around in the nature, Si Sai Yok it's called, along the famous, not to me, river Kway, this place is where the Russians roulette scene of "The deer hunter" was shoot.
To get there we left the valley we where in and got in the next one  parallel to it, fortunately without doing much climbing but on a gentle quiet road; the humidity was rising and we were dripping sweat the whole day.

On the other side stunning surprise, being once again riding very close to Burma the landscape is really similar to what we already saw in Arunothai, the mountains at the horizon has rough harsh shapes and once again we were riding in bamboo Forrest which i start to like better than jungle, perhaps because it makes me wonder i could stop and take a walk into it or pitch my tent somewhere and spent the night, rather than the impenetrable wall of green the jungle is made of.
Amazed by such landscape we decided to take a short day and check in to a resort along the river to explore  the area and have a look at the "Death Railway", built by the Japanese during second world war, which runs by it.

Soon we realised that, just like us, other hundreds of tourist comes here with the same purpose, get the best spot along the river or in a floating house.The amount of Russians tour buses raised and once again we could see them stopping and getting off, still barely dressed,  at random fancy cafes aimed for tourists along the road.
We started looking for accommodation, but nothing cheap would come up, prices for a room where at the starting point of our entire budged for a day, 600Bath.So we pushed on until, late in the day we arrived to the national park.
We where a bit unsatisfied, had to place the tent right next to the car park and the entrance, we where scared to become a picture opportunity for the Russian horde since the early morning, but the park ranger that welcomed us changed our mood with his sweet manners and alchool breath!
The night was boiling but we where too tired to notice, in the morning we decided to take it easy and go for a walk to check out the park, we found the real camp ground under tall and skinny teak trees, had a walk to  the ruins of one of the many "Death Railway" bridges, check out waterfalls and water springs. When we went back to the tent to get our towels and dip in the waterhole the usual tourist buses madness made us change our mind. It was still pretty early and the eating possibilities weren't as good as our previous camp spot so we decided to pack up and go.

Side one of the river...

...And side two, it can get pretty busy as you can see.

Japanese kooking stoves

The way around the park through bamboo Forrest.

We started reading about the area in the guide book, we wanted to avoid more surprises, the whole region is a big tourist attraction for people who want to escape Bangkok or westerners with not much time in Thailand. Thong Pha Phum thoug, the next settlement along the way, was described as a not interesting town where people stop and shop before hitting the dam, if Lonely Planet says "nothing special" it means "great" in bicycle touring dictionary.
So, off we went!

Ciao! I'm out!