ayuthaya and kanchanaburi

nothing much to report from bangkok in the first few days after mom flew home; i walked around the markets and bought bootleg CDs and DVDs, read "dracula" under a shady tree in a nice park adjacent to mo chit (the northernmost stop on bangkok's elevated skytrain), and saw "transformers" in a really comfortable movie theater. in thai movie theaters, you must stand and give respect prior to the film while pictures of the royal family are shown on the screen. "transformers" was okay - typical michael bay explosion-heavy fare - but i really wanted to see "the simpsons movie." unfortunately, that doesn't begin playing here until august 6th, by which time i'll be in vietnam.

tuesday morning i took a lovely three-hour train ride to ayuthaya and spent the next few days touring temples and ruins on foot and by boat. the boat was of the long, thin variety which i've ridden several times in bangkok, but the piers were not nearly so tourist (or chunky brother) friendly, so getting in and getting out without falling into the brown waters of the chao praya river was something of an accomplishment for me.

thursday i took a pair of public buses for five hours 100 kilometers to get to kanchanaburi, a jungle town near the border with burma that is most famous for being the site of the bridge over the river kwai. it was good to see that they had capitalized on this bridge, which was built during world war II under japanese supervision by the forced labor of thousands of american, british, australian, and danish prisoners of war. most every guesthouse and hotel in town contains one of the following words in its name: "bridge," "river," or "kwai." they also had museums and displays and memorials and a really touching allied cemetery in which are buried the remains of some of the 16,000 allied servicemen who died in the construction of the 250-mile thai-burma railway, which the japanese surveyors initially thought would take five years to build, but which was completed, via the POW labor, in 16 months. yesterday was almost unbearably hot here and i can only imagine what it must have been like to have been a forced laborer on the bridge site only sixty-odd short years ago.

i'm taking the train back to bangkok (four hours, 40 baht) in about an hour, where i'll pick up my vietnam visa on khaosan road, spend the night, and then head off to vietnam tomorrow afternoon. enjoy the pictures!