Terrific Thailand

Day 7  Friday, April 6, 2018   Travel to Ayutthaya Janet is enjoying Sticky Rice, which we learned about during a roadside stop on today's drive to Ayutthaya, the Siamese capital for 400 years. Before we departed the Midi Resort, I went down by the river to get one more look at the Kwai River at low flow, with the sand bars and tall mountains off to the west. We departed after breakfast, heading south a bit before turning east. Ayutthaya is located directly north of Bangkok, in fact on the same river. Along the way, we pulled over to this roadside market to sample their Sticky Rice. Nu explained that it was a favorite treat in the part of the country. He described exactly how they make it - soaking the rice over night, adding coconut cream and sugar, cooking that up, then stuffing a portion into a bamboo stick, and roasting that over a charcoal fire for 3.5 hours. During our stop, we could witness this entire process at its various stages. Here are the bamboo...

Day 6  Thursday, April 5, 2018  North of Kamchanaburi What a unique experience to ride for 30 minutes on the "Death Railway" line still in existence. We boarded at the northern-most point where the train still runs, in Nam Tak, after spending the morning visiting Hellfire Pass, where so many POWs died digging through 325 linear feet of solid rock to lay tracks for this train line in 1943. After breakfast, about 24 of us boarded our bus for the fairly long drive north to Hellfire Pass. Along the way, I took this photo to show the mountains to the NW, which are the foothills of the Himalayas. On the other side of that mountain range is Myanmar (Burma). We also passed two elephants, for a brief moment, on our drive.  And some huge gold Buddhas, and some spectacular temples. From the parking lot, it was a long descent down these steps to reach the pathway where the Death Railway used to run. This is what it looked like when we reached the bottom - a flat pathway ...