A scant 30 minutes from the River Kwai bridge was the golden horn of this little seventy-dollar tour I'd taken out of Bangkok on Saturday, July 26: Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua. The Tiger Temple.
Billed as a chance to score some one-on-one time with the rare, elusive Indochinese tiger, the reality turned out to be neither one-on-one nor much time at all. We strode across half a kilometer of dusty temple grounds, strewn with indolent, wandering water buffalo and skittish deer, to the nexus of the action, a spot fancifully called "Tiger Canyon." It was a gully naturally carved out of the pale rock and ochre dust, leaving a natural shady grotto with an artificial waterfall built by some thoughtful, wealthy, and guilt-wracked Thai millionaire. We eager guests traversed the the gravel and hard-packed dust to the bottom of the gully, where a stout fence and double lines of gawkers heralded our arrival at the tiger paddock. Beyond this fence, tigers—some dozen of them—sprawled everywhere near the rock pool at the base of the waterfall, spreading themselves out like the viscous liquid which all somnolent cats resemble. Tanned, dreadlocked foreign volunteers sorted us into two lines: the camera-bearers and the camera-less. I was shunted into the former. When I got to the head of the line, a curt Thai volunteer grasped my wrist and hustled me from one tiger to the next, shoving me into a crouch, snatching my camera away, snapping a picture or two, yanking me to my feet, and packing me off to the next recumbent feline form. The whole affair was run with the efficiency of an assembly line and the quickness of a soccer substitution. I didn't get to savor the fact that I was sitting next to, or petting, a goddamn tiger. It was rather anticlimactic.
I wasn't in the sweetest of moods after the three-and-a-half-hour trip back to Bangkok. Imagine my surprise and delight when I reentered my cubicle at Boxpackers and discovered a lovely handwritten note from Emilia, my Kentish dorm-mate. Sadly, our paths had parted. After I'd left for my tour at 6:30, she had checked out at noon, bound by train for Chiang Mai. I had considered leaving her a note, but hadn't wished to appear forward and creepy; so I'd desisted. She was more earnest. In her missive she wrote that it had been nice to meet me, and she wished me well on the rest of my journey. It's not often you meet such genuineness out on the road. I do hope she and I meet again someday.
It was rather like a field trip, only we didn't stop by school first. The bus came right to my house. At the crack of dawn I was up and ready, but the tour company beat me to the punch. I was still throwing things into my satchel when a bleary-eyed young night clerk came up to tell me a car was parked downstairs for me. I dashed down and leaped into a full-size van, and off we went. There were already two bony, exhausted-looking young Italian girls inside, and on our way out of Bangkok we stopped to pick up three burly Indian fellows and two elderly, grinning Australian women.
The driver was a tall, gaunt man with longish hair and a Heineken baseball cap who barely spoke two words and spent our rest stops sitting in the driver's seat and smoking a listless cigarette. The guide was a shorter, bug-eyed, toad-mouthed fellow with close-cropped graying hair. He introduced himself thus: "My name Cham Long. You call me Long Cham." He grinned a lot and had a wicked sense of humor. He kept patting my pudgy stomach and asking me when my due date was, and he hinted incessantly that one of the three Indian fellows was a ladyboy.
The tour was good, but it was so...rushed. We had only an hour at the floating markets (after a two-hour drive to get there!) which was just enough time for a quick paddle around—for 200 baht—and a sip of coconut juice.
The markets were a royal letdown. I don't mean to be one of those twits who always yaps about authenticity, but the floating markets of Kanchanaburi weren't authentic at all. You could see this whole place had been set up for the tourists' sake. Everything: the boat rides, the cheap souvenirs, the countless Buddha and elephant statues carved from jade and quartz...it was all to fleece the fat white folks from the big city. There were no locals there apart from the mongers and merchants, just foreign phonies like me. I felt like such a poser sitting in that wooden boat, my sandalled feet wet with bilge water, snapping selfies and sucking on a coconut with a straw in it. I'm never going back.
After we finished with the markets, Long Cham rounded us up and we were whisked off to lunch, an assortment of spicy, savory Thai dishes laid out buffet-style at a roadhouse. We were all too hungry to make much conversation, and people pretty much stuck to their own cliques. I was the only solo traveler, but that's fine; I was never much for conversation anyway.
After another long drive, we found ourselves at...
