Getting up super early and leaving the hotel before breakfast starts is usually the best way to beat the crowds, but it seems that thousands of tourists have done exactly the same thing, corralled by their tour guides into people carriers and driven west of Bangkok to the Maeklong Railway Market. We’ve seen this drama before, in various parts of the world where a railway line cuts straight through the heart of a market, but it’s never been quite this swamped with people.
Expecting a colourful street market, where traders sell to locals, and a few interested travellers come along to join in, we’re confronted instead with wall to wall tourists, jostling for position outside coffee shops and souvenir emporiums, many thrusting selfie sticks over the heads of each other to prepare for the incoming train. There’s beer-drinking Americans, Chinese tour groups, European sightseers and, of course, grateful locals making lots of money from the combined activity… and why not?
Toto finds a spot for us amongst the throng where we order an iced coffee and banana crisps and then squeeze in to watch as the 8.30am arrival of the train from Bangkok slowly parades past. It’s full of tourists leaning out of the windows, taking photos of us similar tourists lining the track, while we take photos of those same tourists on the train. And within less than a minute the train has passed and the whole charade evaporates as we all disperse to our waiting people carriers to head elsewhere. It’s delightfully pointless!
We stop next at a coconut farm to be shown how various products are made, before the inevitable wander around the on-site market, trying to avoid buying souvenirs for the sake of it. And then we continue on past farms growing mango, rice, pomelo, guava and lychee until we get to Damnoen Saduak Floating Market which has also morphed from being a local tradition into a rampant tourist attraction.
Hundreds of small boats cram the waterways, with a never ending line of happy souls clambering into each successive boat, all being warned to keep their hands inside to prevent their fingers getting crushed as the boats barge each other or mangled by the reckless waving around of propellers from on-board motors belching fumes in faces. It’s noisy and very hot and, once we’ve had the ‘official’ photo taken (to be slapped on a souvenir frame and sold to us at the end), we’re thankful for the parasols they attach to the boat as we set off into the aquatic traffic jam.
We all float along like a big conjoined cluster, past hawkers selling food made on floating kitchens or beers for 60 baht (£1.50) from polystyrene boxes. There are women touting pictures of tourists with snakes wrapped around them and little boats flogging coconut ice creams, plus row upon row of souvenir stalls all selling the same things. It’s insanely chaotic but becomes weirdly meditative, floating yet caught in the eye of the storm.
Eventually we turn down a side canal and break free of the crowds, passing people’s houses and seeing vegetation, before looping back to the disembarkation point after an hour. To exit we have to walk back through the madness with Toto asking if we want to stop for food. We elect not to eat here but to drive on a couple of hours to Nam Tok, our next stop, where we hope things will be calmer.
Nam Tok means waterfall and this small village, about 100kms from the border with Myanmar, hosts a small railway station which connects it to the larger town of Kanchanaburi. It is now infamous as the start of the Death Railway, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of labourers and prisoners of war, forced to dig a railroad by the Japanese as a supply route to connect their forces in Burma and Thailand.
The horrors of that time will be laid bare for us tomorrow but for now we have lunch in a wooden restaurant by the side of the road and then board the old style train for the two hour trundling journey to Kanchanaburi, our home for the next two nights. The sun is baking through the open windows and the air is hot and thick, what little breeze there is doing little to cool us down, as we roll past endless fields of tapioca, sugarcane and banana, the Burmese mountains that divide Myanmar and Thailand looming on the horizon.
After 45 minutes or so we get to Thamkrasae station in Wang Pho, where lots of new tourists jump on board, riding the next short distance for its amazing views of the River Kwai, and experiencing the rickety nature of the notorious stretch known as the Death Railway. The track snakes along the hillside river bank, with death-defying sections constructed of struts and wooden stilts still in place from the efforts of the poor, brave souls who endured unspeakable cruelty and deprivation during their captivity in WWII.
Once the majority of people - many of them from a big party of French tourists - disembark, we slowly clatter on while the sun starts to set over dusty fields of agriculture, our faces taking on a faint orange hue of dirt that later stains our towels. At one stage, we have to wait while they change our engine, but eventually we cross the famous Bridge over the River Kwai and pull into Kanchanaburi station where we all dismount.
Crowds of people line the bridge taking photos as we come to a halt, and we are able to walk back a little along the tracks to get a view, but choose to head to our hotel rather than fight our way along the bridge to join the selfie brigades.
The U-Inchantree Hotel sits right on the banks of the River Kwai and is a lovely base for our stay, but our dining options there are limited as they, like many other places in Thailand, do not understand the concept of vegetarianism, so Toto suggests the rather swanky Keeree Tara Retreat, just a short walk away. Once we’ve unpacked and showered, we wander on up there, and are delighted to find they have a small vegetarian selection, with the dishes also written in English, which is extremely helpful as none of the staff speak it.
So, once seated on the floating pontoon’s dining area, we communicate by pointing at the pictures. One word our waitress does know is “spicy”, which she asks us with a raised eyebrow when we order a mushroom Thom Yum soup. We say, “a little spice, maybe medium?” and she smiles sweetly, writing it down. But oh my God, when it arrives the fire in the bowl is eye-wateringly strong and with just two mouthfuls our lips are burning and our tongues are almost unquenchable.
We quickly order banana and mango yoghurt smoothies to try and take the pain away, and hope that the tofu dishes laid before us will be edible for our western palates, or else we will be going to bed hungry tonight. They are not quite as ferocious with their chilli heat, but still make our eyes water. However once we’ve acclimatised to the spice, no doubt by burning our taste buds to a cinder, we are able to enjoy them with only moderate pain.
When we return for dinner the following night, avoiding the carnivorous New Year’s Eve buffet our hotel is charging an arm and a leg for, we make a point to request everything as “mild, no spice!!” and have a fantastic meal enjoying incredible flavours. Note to selves for the rest of our trip; ‘go mild or go hungry’.
We can’t make that mistake again!
