I just can’t wait to get on the road again….

In an odd twist of events, our summer travel plans have been all over the map – literally!  Initially Brooklyn and I were going to go for her ‘grad trip’ back to Thailand, but then in what appears to be an almost yearly event, some political protests turned into civil unrest and it looked like Thailand was going to be off the table for travel.  Between that and a change of jobs for Brooklyn, she has decided to post-pone her trip for another time.  She really wants to go back to Thailand and wants to be able to do it when she knows her schedule is not in flux, and that her destination is not subject to change.

At any rate as we were doing all the planning, Mrs Columbus decided that she was going to come along, so when Brooklyn put her trip off, we started to look at other places the 2 of us could go for a little R&R.  We looked at Costa Rica, the Caribbean, and some spots in South America, but it seemed like Mother Nature was mostly working against us – volcanoes erupting in Ecuador and Guatemala, a giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the start of what is predicted to be a very active hurricane season in the Caribbean seemed to just put some sort of dark cloud over each spot we started looking at.

And then the odd twist of fate happens – after about 4-5 weeks of protests in Bangkok, the whole thing ends with a couple of days of rioting and a crackdown by the Thai military.  After a couple of weeks it seems that all is normal back in our beloved Land of Smiles – so one morning on the weekend there we are sitting down having some breakfast bantering about where on our narrowing short list of places we should go, or if we should just give up and stay home, and Mrs Columbus gets on the phone to see what our options are like for points tickets.  And then BAM, after weeks of indecisiveness she spent a couple of hours on the phone, and just booked them.

Our final destination – yup, back to Thailand 🙂  We figured if we are going to use up our points we might as well get good value for them, and Mrs Columbus feels good about places she knows, and after the great time we had in Asia last year, you just can’t go wrong with something you know and love.

I finally got my act together and got my holiday photos sorted out – a couple of the programs I use to clean them up and get them posted to the website were broken for a while last fall, and I got woefully behind.  That left me with a daunting task to get caught up, so it was easy to put it off for a while……

At any rate, I have now posted photos from:

 Our few days on the boat in Campbell River

 Brooklyn’s Senior photos

 Jackie’s Soccer

 Christmas with the family

 Our holiday gatherings with friends and neighbors

 Rachael’s gymnastics

Click on the links to see the full galleries

It has been a couple of weeks since we returned, and now that life is starting to return to a normal pace, and the kids are back in school we can take some time to reflect on our trip overseas.

When we were getting ready to leave it seemed like 7 weeks was such a long time and there was a little apprehension that we might get a little ‘burned-out’ before the vacation was over, but the time seemed to go by so quickly, and although we never rushed through most of our stops it feels like there is still so much more there that we did not see.

As we anticipated, the cost of our vacation there was a fantastic value – not including the flight over there, our ‘all-in’ costs for the entire family were less than $200 USD per day!! That included all the in-country travel we did, tours, shopping, hotels, meals – everything.  I would be hard pressed to find a vacation destination at home where I could get a hotel room for 5 people for that let alone cover all the rest of the costs.

A great vacation is not just made of low cost though, and the experience itself was far more valuable than can be measured by the cost alone.  The chance for the kids to see people living without all the high-tech gadgets that invade our world and not care about them at all is something that I hope will stick with them forever.  Their lives seem so uncomplicated and much less stressful than ours, and even though they don’t have all sorts of fancy stuff, they seem as a group to be much happier and satisfied than we are here.

We were impressed by the nature of the people we met and interacted with, and many of them were extremely helpful, often going the extra mile to help us figure something out (like how to get from city A to city B), or giving us some local hints on where to shop for something at the local price instead of where the tourists go.  We had some fantastic tour guides that took us on private tours and were happy to answer our endless questions about what it was like for the local people, their families, etc.

We went to a total of 6 different places while we were there, all of them the ‘normal’ places that would come up as tourist destinations for someone going to Thailand, and did not have any spots we went to where we felt disappointed to have spent time there.  There are certainly spots we would not go back to having been there once, and spots we want to see even more of, but there are also lots of places that we just did not have time to see.

Of course any destination can be different things to different people – we saw a lot of people who were disappointed or frustrated when things did not go the way they expected or the way they would have ‘back home’, but the most important thing to remember is ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do’.  Thailand is a very different culture than what we are used to, and thankfully for us we learned quickly to adapt to the way things are done over there, and sort of break-free of just doing things the way the bulk of tourists do and tried to ‘go native’ (as much as we could with 5 people).  Accepting the language barrier, and taking things as they came made it a lot less stressful when something went unexpected or was mis-understood, and in the end I think gave us a lot of valuable travel tips about different ways to accomplish the things we wanted to do without getting lost, frustrated, or taken advantage of.

We will definitely go back as there is sooo much more to see, and even Mrs. Columbus became quite attached to the place.  Having traveled to a number of different places I absolutely rate Thailand as the top spot I have been so far for a peaceful, relaxing vacation.

I want to give a few thank-yous to people who helped make this all happen, without you we could not have had the once-in-a-lifetime experience that we did: my brother Chad and the guys at work for picking up my slack, and working around my funky and intermittent schedule, our fantastic neighbors who watched over the house while we were gone, my parents who did a ton of work to help us get ready in the last days before we left, and of course everyone who followed our adventures online and sent messages and comments – it helped us have a feeling of being in touch while 1/2 way around the world.  Thank you all!

Rather than spend another day in Bangkok for our last day here, we decide to get back out of the city and take a day trip out to Kanchanaburi.  This is the location of The Bridge on the River Kwai and the Death Railway.

The trip out to Kanchanaburi is about 2.5 hours by car, and we stop about half way there to visit a floating market.  In days gone past much of the trade and transportation in Thailand was carried out on the rivers and klongs (canals) that run through the country.  The Thai people would go out each day in small boats and buy and sell goods, fruits, vegetables, meats, or whatever they needed – the exchanges would be carried out from boat to boat and/or from merchants on the banks of the klongs.

Our driver takes us to a small pier where we hire a mini version of a longtail boat to run us through the market and see the sights.  Initially it looks like this may be a dud trip and prepare for disappointment because for the first 5 minutes or so we do not see any sort of boat or market activity, then we come alongside a couple of ‘shops’ that front onto the river, but see mostly the same old stuff we have seen everywhere else – Mrs. Columbus is giving me that ‘maybe we should just go back look’ when the boat turns a corner into what looks like complete chaos.  There are boats everywhere, about half are filled with tourists taking in the spectacle, and the other half are filled with goods of all varieties imaginable – there are boats with fresh fruits all cut and cleaned and ready to eat, there are boats with fresh flowers, boats with meat, boats with beverages, and even boats with propane burners and woks making fresh fried dishes.

There are times when there are so many boats jammed in side by side that it seems like no-one is going to be able to move, but somehow the Thai boat drivers seem to be able to bang their way around each other and push on ahead.  The klongs seem to go everywhere, and as you pass by a maze of endless passages seems to evolve, but the driver seems to know exactly where he is going and before long we are back at the pier where we started.  A short break to have a drink and some mango with sticky rice that we bought from a boat vendor and we are back on our way.

Thailand was not really an active participant in the second World War, aligning with neither the Axis or the Allies, although various parts of it were occupied by both the Axis and the Allied forces during the conflict.  The Japanese Army occupied much of the northern part of the country, and wanted to construct a rail link from Bangkok to Rangoon (in Burma) in order to move war supplies more easily.  As the rail line got close to the Burma border the country gets a lot more mountainous and construction of a rail line there would require crossing the range of mountains that separates Thailand and Burma.  Over 250,000 locals and Allied prisoners of war were conscripted to work on the railway, and over 100,000 died as a result of the harsh working conditions and poor nourishment provided by the Japanese.

The rail line was entirely built by manual labor (no heavy machinery was used at all), and follows the Kwai River for much of the route.  Today the line ends at Nam Tok well inside the Thai border, and the link to Burma has long since been dismantled.  There is a train that runs from Bangkok all the way to Nam Tok, but most tourists get on the train at Kanchanaburi or Tha Kilen for the trip up to Nam Tok to see the most spectacular parts of the railway.  There are places where it seems like the tracks are clinging to the side of a rock face with the river directly below and the jungle is so dense in places that you can sometimes feel leaves and branches pop in through the open windows.

The train is definately worth the $3 USD ticket price (Tha Kilen to Nam Tok) and after some lunch in Nam Tok we stop to see a spectacular waterfall that is at the end of the line – the actual original Thai-Burma rail line would have gone right past the falls, but there is now a park here and people can swim in the pools that are formed at the bottom of the falls.

From there we travel by car back to Kanchanaburi to visit the war museum and see the actual bridge that crosses the Kwai River.  The bridge that stands there today is not the actual bridge that existed during the war – the original bridge was a wooden structure that crossed the river, and later a second steel bridge was added, however, both bridges were frequent bombing targets by Allied forces during the war and both of the original bridges were destroyed.  The current bridge was re-constructed on the site of the steel bridge, re-using some of the spans and supports of the original structure.  There is a very small section of the original wooden bridge that remains on one side of the river and is now part of the war museum.

The original bridge was made famous in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai made in the late 50s, and the movie is based on the book of the same name that is the account of one of the POWs that was interred in the camp there. The movie is still well worth watching even if there are no Hollywood style special effects, and the movie was filmed in Thailand so is a great representation of the geography we have been seeing.

There is war memorial and cemetery there also that gets onto most tour routes, but we are running out of time and must start our journey back to Bangkok – our return flight to the US leaves at 10pm and we have a 3 hour drive ahead of us.

The somber note of all the war stuff seems a little fitting as we are all more than a little saddened with the thought that it is time for us to leave – it seems like only yesterday when we were arriving for what has turned out to be a great trip.

… is more than enough for me!

When we planned our original itinerary, we included 2 days at the end of the trip in Bangkok to see any additional sights we wanted to see, and any additional shopping that needed to get done without having to pack bags full of souvenirs around the country with us.

Well after 40+ days of peaceful travels around Thailand, our return to Bangkok was a bit of a slap back to reality!  Everything that we decided we did not like about Bangkok – the congestion, the pollution, the crowds of people – immediately reminded us that we were not in the country anymore.  I’m sure there are lots of reasons why it is a huge and growing city, but for us time spent in Bangkok is not a selling feature for Thailand 🙂  Out of all the places we have stayed, the rooms here are the most expensive, and the lowest satisfaction overall – we cannot wait to be done with our 2 nights here…

We take one of our last 2 days in Thailand to go to the Chatuchak Weekend Market – this is the largest market in Bangkok and only runs on the weekend.  There are thousands of stalls/vendors, and what seems like all of the people in Bangkok wandering through the tight alleyways that make up the market.

I foolishly have assumed that we are actually done most of our shopping already, having scored some great deals in Chiang Mai and our trip to the Golden Triangle, but I am quickly re-educated as the ladies acquire bag after bag of new stuff to some how jam into our luggage for the return trip.  After a few hours of wedging ourselves through the mass of people we call it a day and return to our hotel with several armloads of new goodies.

The market is really one of those things that I guess you need to see to appreciate, and now I can cross it off my list 🙂

Tomorrow is another day…….