Thailand - Floating Market and River Kwai

I took another day tour out of Bangkok to visit the Dumnoen Saduak floating market and the River Kwai.

The market was not what I was expecting - I was expecting a local market with fruits/vegetables/meats/goods/etc. but instead it was a tourist souvenir market. I took a boat ride (along with everyone else) where they paddled you to market stalls and people tried to sell you souvenirs.

Floating market

 

After the floating market, we went to Kanchanaburi to see the bridge over the River Kwai. I had heard the name before but hadn't read the book or watched the movie so I didn't know anything about the bridge. Turns out that the book and film aren't actually true (the part about the bridge and railway being built by Allied POW's during WWII is true, but the rest isn't really). The bridge wasn't/isn't even over the River Kwai... it's over a different river, a stretch of which the Thais renamed because tourists kept asking to see the bridge on the River Kwai.



The bridge

I went to a museum complex here, which had to be the weirdest museum I've ever seen. I'm not even sure how much of what was written is true and how much was for entertainment value. There were a lot of relics from WWII and then interspersed randomly were other unrelated exhibits (like samples of Thai money over the ages, or mounted water buffalo skulls, or a directory of past Miss Thailand winners).



Yeah... atomic bombs tend to destroy
cities "in a jiffy".

This in a room full of WWII photos



This seems a bit hypocritical...