Thailand: Floating Market, War Museum, Cobra Show

Since I reserved my hotel for a three-night stay, I got a choice of half-day or one-day package tours. I chose the one with the main destinations you see in the title, except the Cobra Show was supposed to be a tour of a coconut processing facility, which would have presumably included monkeys climbing up and down palms gathering coconuts--on the a whole, I got the more exciting deal.

The floating market is rather more a tourist destination than a market these days--I wonder how many mangoes this lady sold from her boat on a given day:


A few more photos and you've got the gist of it. The bottom photo shows starfruit, lychee and mangosteen, the triumvirate of Thai exotic fruit.




From there, we took a longtail boat down the klong for about a twenty minute ride to a temple that specializes in snake worship; adjacent to it was a "Thai Cobra Show" for only 200 Bt extra. I made a video collapsing the 30 minutes into about three minutes, with just the exciting bits:



From there, we stopped for lunch and headed west to the bridge on the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi province, part of the Siam-Burma railroad built on the backs of Allied POWs. There is a famous movie about it, but it's not very accurate. Some 13,000 POWs died in building the railway, along with 60,000 or more civilians under brutal Japanese rule.




You can pay your respects to those who lost their lives by buying some "jewelly" at cut rate prices.


Adjacent, more or less, to the bridge site is the JEATH War Museum, with the acronym representing the nationalities involved--"Japanese, English, American, Thai and Holland". But it is much more than that. Much more. Rubbing shoulders, or at least sharing exhibit halls, with military armament is a collection of Miss Thailand Pageant formal wear going back thirty years; a vast collection of dilapidated typewriters and wireless sets, coins and bills with a face value totalling millions; a collection of rocks and gems that seemed promising to an old rockhound like myself, but alas was quite ordinary, aside from a couple of two-foot amethyst geodes. Most exhibit halls were decorated with floor-to-ceiling wall murals depicting various events and personages in Thai history, including every king and every President. Alas, the lighting conditions were poor and flash photography forbidden (and my camera sucks).

Still, there was a strange display that claimed to contain 106 bodies from the Siam-Burma Railroad construction. (I had hoped to visit an Allied cemetery but we just drove by instead of stopping.)



The ground floor porticos (the museum is a sprawling, massive facility) had a series of statues--the left hand building had key WWII figures, including the bad guys:



... and the good guys (that's Truman and Einstein in the first one):



Finally, a few shots of the exterior of this extraordinary place:




Time to call it a day and head back to the hotel.