The bridge over the river Kwai

On a train traveling on the bridge over the river Kwai.  The train is ancient. It's a veritable Babelon as conversations in dozens of languages babble on.  I'm sitting with 2 Swedish exchange student who are here for a month then off to Aus to get engineering degrees. Hey, if I'm sitting with the engineers, who's driving this thing. 1.5 hours to go. I crack me up. The trip cost me about 80 bucks for the day. We visited a war cemetary, a war museum and are now on the train.

The japanese had built the train bridge using slave labour from the POWs they'd captured. They literally worked them to death. They have morbid recreations of those events here using statues painted to look like people. The whole thing is creepy but very interesting. There is a huge assortment of weapons and motorcycles, cars and tools here.

Later that day...

We got off the train. The scenery is amazing along the way. We had a great lunch on a floating barge. Met a nice german girl and an austrian and his daughter. From there we are taking a bamboo raft to an elephant ride. The ride is on an eggplant farm. The elephants can climb amazingly steep hills with three of us on their backs. To be honest this is not my favorite part. A young elephant is chained to a  nearby tree by his ankle. They look very intelligent and docile. Rough, like the soles of your feet, their hair is course. They're very agile and patient with people. Very majestic animals.

The next stop was a waterfall. We climbed around a bit. Some dude came up to me and the austrian (maybe he's dutch....) and asked if he could take is girlfriend's picture with us. Then we were surounded by 3 or 4 giggling thai girls and got our picture taken. Strange.

The ride home was scary as hell. The driver was screaming down the road. They tailgate and pass with the narrowest margin of error. Made it back in one peice.