Kanchanaburi

I spent a few days in Kanchanaburi town in June 2025, and I also visited the gorgeous Sai Yok region (around an hour from Kanchanaburi town) which has a great WW2 museum, and the Erawan national park (also around an hour from the town). All recommended, as is the scenic Kanchanaburi-Sai Yok train ride. I wouldn’t say Kanchanaburi is among the most exciting towns in Thailand, but I had fun and ate well enough, and the surrounding area is as beautiful as anywhere I’ve been. Plus, I can finally tell people I’ve seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, though I’ve yet to see the actual movie. 

(Next time someone asks if I’ve seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, I fully intend to answer yes, play dumb about the existence of the movie, and manipulate the conversation into the most tedious and confusing Abbott and Costello dialogue I can conjure.) 

(I’m still blown away by the fact that the French book the movie is based on, Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï, is by Pierre Boulle, whose other famous book is La Planète des singes, which got made into the film Planet of the Apes. I suppose both books were based somewhat on his own experiences as a POW, which he wrote about in My Own River Kwai. I’ve yet to read his work.)

(There’s actually no such thing as the “River Kwai.” The bridge is on the river formerly known as the Mae Klong. The river connects to a khwae, or tributary, today known as the Khwae Noi River (noi means small). The book took the name from that, and to cash in on the film’s success, they renamed the upper part of the Mae Klong the Khwae Yai (yai means big) so that the bridge was actually on some sort of kwai-ish river, while the present day Mae Klong runs from the point in Kanchanaburi town where the Khwae Yai and Khwae Noi meet. Also the book is fictional, the movie was shot in Sri Lanka, and this is an overrated reason to come to Kanchabanburi anyway, though I admit it’s the reason I first heard of the place. More info from Thailand’s travel guru Richard Barrow.)

(The history and discussion of rivers and tributaries is confusing without a map. I couldn’t really find a good one to link to. This one is kind of okay I guess.) 

(For other films/books on the same topic, there’s The Railway Man & The Narrow Road to the Deep North.)

Anyway, during my various long stays in Bangkok I had often thought of going to Kanchanaburi as a day trip, as it’s just a few hours away, and there’s a special weekend train for that. This sounded fun when I first heard about it, but I’m glad I never got around to it. The itinerary seems so thin and rushed as to be pointless to me. One to two days in the town is good, and you could easily spend a week or more exploring the province.

Kanchanaburi is a large province, and it is part of Thailand’s long border with Myanmar. This is related to both of the big draws of the region. 

First is its natural beauty, with magnificent mountains. This part of the Myanmar border is a natural one, defined by the Tenasserim Hills. I always found it funny how a small sliver of Myanmar runs down a large chunk of Thailand’s western border (like they should totally annex that shit), but now I get it. (Should have been obvious. I’m dumb.) 

The Tenasserim range has few passes, one of which is the Three Pagodas Pass, an active border that “has been the main land route into western Thailand since ancient times.” Wikipedia also says that it “has reputedly served as a route for Indian monks in the 3rd century to disseminate Buddhism in Thailand,” but this is maybe just a theory. It remained a major route in the Ayutthaya era when it was “the main invasion route for the Burmese, but at times was also used against them by Siamese armies.” 

According to a blog post by the well known historians Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, “Although there were several other passes across the Tenasserim Range, this route was especially sensitive because it was the shortest. A Burmese army could march from the Three Pagodas watershed to Ayutthaya in fifteen days. In 1663–64, a Burmese army again invaded through the pass, and a Siamese army counter-attacked along the same route in the following year. In the sack of Ayutthaya of 1765–67, one of the Burmese armies crossed via the pass, and most of the withdrawal seems to have taken this route. In all between 1548 and 1786, Burmese armies invaded through the Three Pagodas Pass eleven times, and Siamese armies attacked in the opposite direction four times.”

Near the Three Pagodas Pass is the beautiful looking town of Sanghklaburi, apparently pretty diverse with a population that includes Karen, Mon, and Burmese people (and, by extension, their food). I think of northern Thailand as the area where Thai and Burmese cultures meet, but here is another crossroads. The Khwae Noi River runs from Sanghklaburi all the way to Kanchanaburi town.

Given all of the invasions, there was a need for a defensive outpost, which explains the location of Kanchanaburi town. There’s an Old Kanchanaburi settlement, with some ruined temples you can see, though that didn’t seem worth prioritizing. That’s slightly up the Khwae Yai river, a former attack route from the pass, and there were numerous battles nearby. After the Burmese shifted their attack route to the Khwae Noi river, the Siamese army put up at the meeting point of the Khwae Noi and Khwae Yai rivers (see earlier), the site of the present day Kanchanaburi town. In 1831, the Rama III era, the city walls came up, some of which you can still see in the town (not that interesting, though). 

There are even older settlements, including the Mueang Sing Historical Park, which has Khmer ruins said to be the westernmost part of the Khmer empire, likely also to block those pesky invaders coming through the pass. This is also along the Khwae Noi. It looked worthwhile but I didn’t have time to see it.

Nobody seems to care about any of that, they just like the pretty mountains. But I found it interesting, and it adds a layer of interest and grandeur to the scenery.

The other big draw of Kanchanaburi is the WW2 history, for reasons that involve going in the other direction through the pass, from Thailand to Burma. The Japanese, essentially occupying nearly all of Southeast Asia, wanted to bring supplies to Myanmar for their invasion of India (which I learned about in Kohima, where they were thwarted) without getting intercepted by the sea routes, so they built the infamous “Death Railway,” named such because of the horrible conditions of the laborers who built it. The line went from Bangkok to Rangoon, though the parts the Japanese built were from Kanchanaburi (specifically the nearby Ban Pong) through the Three Pagodas pass to some place in Burma I’ve never heard of, connecting to pre-existing lines on both sides (here’s a map).

Wikipedia shows 61.8k Allied POWs worked on the railway, of which 12.6k died. The conditions were even worse for the Southeast Asian civilians forced to work on it. Their numbers aren’t as well documented, but Wikipedia says there were 180,000 in total, including “Javanese, Malayan Tamils, Burmese, Malayan Chinese.” Some estimates are even higher, and to get an idea of the death rates: “More than 100,000 Malayan Tamils were brought into the project and around 60,000 perished.”

I won’t say much else about the railway or the war as most of what I know comes from the Hellfire Pass museum, and anyway this is the most widely discussed aspect of Kanchanaburi.

There is other history to Kanchanaburi that nobody seems to care about, such as the ancient Ban Kao settlement, where an archaeological site turned up some surprisingly cool pottery which you can see at a museum. 

Perhaps a third big draw could be the jungle cuisine, but as a vegetarian it wasn’t so easily accessible to me. In retrospect, I regret not ordering the 400 baht plate of wild mushrooms at a small local restaurant, though that would have been the most expensive dish I’d ever ordered in Thailand.

Now, onto what I actually did there.

I’ll write about Kanchanaburi town and its immediate surroundings first, then will briefly cover Sai Yok and Erawan park at the end. There is much else to do in the province if you have time, and preferably a car. I wish I could have gone to Sangkhlaburi, which is beyond Sai Yok.

Kanchanaburi Town

In Kanchanaburi I stayed at The Nine Bed & Restaurant which cost around 500 baht a night and is walking distance from both the train station and, most importantly for me, On’s Thai-Issan Vegan restaurant. Not a fancy or special hotel or anything, but very good for the price and location. Nice staff too, and the food looked good, though I never got a chance to eat there. You should probably find a nice resort with beautiful river views or something, but if this meets your needs and budget level then I recommend it. It’s in a shitty touristy neighborhood, but it’s not too bad, much better than the area where the vegan restaurant is.

I got around by foot and Grab, but it would be fun to take longtail boats. 

I’ll give my food recommendations further down, but if you’re there on a Saturday night, I recommend the Saturday night market (Song Kwae Walking Street). Fun time, even though as a vegetarian there was little I wanted to eat, and it was overly crowded. As with a lot of night markets, there’s a lot of junk foodish stuff, but there were some nice local food stalls. Two unusual highlights that I got were little velvet tamarind candies and black sticky rice topped with a delicious salted peppery mung bean paste. A local thing that I didn’t like was a fried omelet thing with greens in it. Other than that I think we just got beverages, typical stuff you get at Thai night markets like avocado smoothie and honey lemonade. Despite a lot of foreign tourists in Kanchanaburi, I saw hardly any at the market. 

I arrived Saturday, otherwise I would have gone for the Friday night Wat Nuea Floating Market at the temple nearby

The big draw in Kanchanaburi town is the WW2 history, and particularly the famous bridge. The town is reasonably charming beyond that, though, and there are very cool temples to visit near the town. Because I went first to Sai Yok, which has the excellent Hellfire Pass museum, I spent less time on WW2 attractions in Kanchanaburi than I would have otherwise, and I wouldn’t say that chapter of its history looms super large on my impression of the town. 

That said, I’ve heard great things about the Death Railway Museum and Research Centre, so if you aren’t planning to go to Hellfire Pass you should definitely come here. This is right across from the war cemetery, which was nice to see (we went at sunset one of the days). The board says that over 5,000 Commonwealth and almost 1,900 Dutch servicemen are buried or commemorated here. Next to it is a beautiful Chinese cemetery.

The bridge is of course a major draw to Kanchanaburi, but I went over it by train (coming from Sai Yok to Kanchanaburi) and didn’t feel a need to return. The area seemed very touristy and crappy. It was cool riding over it though! Near the bridge is the well reviewed but kinda wacky looking JEATH museum but people say that it’s closing, and anyway not as good as the other museum. On the other side of town is another, smaller JEATH museum that I happened to walk by and decided to quickly run through, but it was not worth the time or money, at least not with better museums available.

My Kanchanaburi highlights were probably the temples outside of the town. There are a lot of temples, and notably cave temples, within a short distance from the town. Most are relatively modern, though around 45 minutes away from the town is the Mueang Sing Historical Park, which has two 13th-14th century temples that are said to be the westernmost Khmer ruins. I didn’t make time for that, though.

I saw what I believe to be the most popular temples: Wat Tham Suea and Wat Ban Tham. They are near each and located around 20 minutes from the town. I loved both and highly recommend them. In most countries I much prefer the older places of worship to the new ones, but these are good examples of what I love about modern Thai temples. Over the top and kitschy, but also beautiful, charming, and culturally interesting from the standpoint of both aesthetic choices and people watching. 

Just start your day early since it’s hot as hell and you’ve got steps to climb. Keep an eye out on the drive as you’ll pass by some beautiful Chinese cemeteries on the way.

We started with Wat Tham Suea, which is the further out of the two. But first we stopped at Meena Cafe, a nice cafe with a stunning view of rice fields and the temple. Recommended! More for the views than the F&B, but the coffee was good (we got a delicious coconut flower nectar coffee) and the pad thai was solid. For some reason I thought we’d be able to walk from the cafe to the temple, but that’s not possible without melting. Thankfully our Grab driver offered to stay and drive us around after, and he charged the same as the Grab prices showed.

The temple is awesome, both from a distance and up close, with the giant Buddha and several beautiful buildings. There’s a big hall with stairs you can climb and murals on each floor, but it was hot and not especially interesting, though there’s a beautiful shrine on the top floor and you get some great views of the Buddha from the windows. Lonely Planet says “place coins in small trays on a conveyor belt that drops donations into a central bowl with a resounding clang,” but I never found that.

Though it gets less attention than the stuff up top, my favorite part of the temple was actually the eponymous tham seua, which means “tiger cave.” This is one of those things that I loved that perhaps nobody else will? There’s a shrine in the cave with a robed tiger statue. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I want to be a follower of Tiger Baba. And the cave is guarded by weird alien crocodile gargoyle guys. And there’s all sorts of other kitchiness, plus a hall next door with a mummified monk. Amazing stuff all around.

Then we drove to Wat Ban Tham. We were hungry when we arrived so we checked out the food stalls out front. There was a stall making vegetarian khao kriab pak mor, little thin rice dumplings, stuffed with a delicious sweet/savory peanut mixture. 10/10. 

The temple is notable for the giant dragon mouth stairway that you walk through. Because of the heat it’s a tiring journey up what otherwise wouldn’t be a difficult staircase. I love cave temples, though, so it’s worth it. Though architecturally everything appears new, the cave has apparently been in use as a temple since the Sukhothai era (13th-15th centuries).

In addition to the main Buddhist shrine, the cave features a little shrine dedicated to one of the characters from Khun Chang Khun Phaen. (If you don’t know KCKP, see my Thailand reading recommendations.) It’s not the area’s only connection to the story; Khun Phaen and his mom lived in Old Kanchanaburi (aka Kanburi) and he presumably studied at what is today called Wat Khun Phaen. The shrine in the cave is for Buakhli, a character from this area whose image has appeared on one of the rocks in the cave, and whose story is told in murals inside of the dragon mouth walkway. 

Most of you probably don’t know the story, so to briefly sum up Buakhli’s role (spoiler alert!) I’ll quote from Atlas Obscura: 

“In the story, Khun Phaen, a high-ranking soldier close to the king, earns the favor of a powerful sorcerer. The sorcerer takes such a liking to Khun Phaen that he offers his daughter [Buakhli] in marriage. Unfortunately, some time after Khun Phaen learns of his wife’s pregnancy, Khun Phaen and his father-in-law begin arguing so much that the sorcerer plots to have Khun Phaen killed. Khun Phaen discovers that his wife has been commanded by her father to poison him, and in a vengeful rage, Khun Phaen cuts his own child out of his wife. With the bloody fetus in hand, Khun Phaen builds a fire at a temple, placing the body on a grill after wrapping it in pieces of sacred cloth covered in prayers. While Khun Phaen chants prayers, the roasting soon reduces the fetus to a dried-out husk, with only paper-thin skin stretched over a skeleton. At the end of the ritual, the violently aborted child had become a ghost with whom Khun Phaen can speak and communicate, a sort of guardian spirit for his father.”

(This sounds like a full epic right here, but this is only a small part of the KCKP story!!! You can see some of this around 1:40 into the film’s trailer. There’s a board at the temple telling a slightly different variation of the story.)

So read that while you peruse the murals, and keep an eye out for the statue of “Golden Child,” the guardian spirit fetus boy. According to Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit’s KCKP blog, “The villagers of Ban Tham proudly believe that they are descendants of Muen Han [Buakhli’s father] and the characters in KCKP. Many of them are now gravel contractors which perhaps explains the haulage vehicles among the offerings. We were told there were bi-monthly rituals honoring Buakhli at the shrine.”

Beyond the main cave is another stairway that leads you to a trail which leads you to another cave. I recommend this if you’re there at like 6am. When I went in the middle of the day… it was so insanely hot. It’s not even that far of a trail, but it felt like an eternity. The cave was beautiful. There were some temples at the top which aren’t that interesting but you get some nice views. But I sweat out my entire body weight to get there and it was really exhausting. Up to you. I saw a beautiful green snake while climbing up the stairway out of the first cave.

There are some more cave temples and interesting non-cave temples in the area. I would gladly go back and see more. Check out Travelfish for some other recommendations. (And Wat Thewa Sangkharam in the old town has some nice old murals, though that building was sadly under renovation when I was there.)

After the temples, the highlight was the old town. It feels a bit like a quiet, old fashioned Bangkok neighborhood. I had fun just wandering, looking at the buildings, the old ladies selling old school street foods, the Chinese medicine shops, the jewelry shop that also sold dried mushrooms and ginseng, the abandoned old cinemas, the morning and evening market, etc. 

It was a bit too sleepy, though. I got there at around 10am and couldn’t decide if it was too early or too late, or if it’s always like this. I feel like a 7am stroll would have been livelier. But the sleepiness is maybe part of the charm, for a day or so. I liked when we were walking and saw a small crowd and a police officer outside someone’s house, and when we looked into the house we saw a monitor lizard romping around.

The highlight of the area is Pak Phraek road (also spelled pakprak, and the name means “confluence,” referring to the meeting point of the rivers here), which has a number of nice old buildings clustered together. Some have been turned into cafes, and there were signs of construction of lame touristy things, but for the most part it wasn’t very gentrified. I wouldn’t say the sights here are spectacular, and it’s less charming than a similar street I went to in Lampang, but there was a variety of interesting architecture, some with a mix of Asian and European styles in the same building, and there’s a traditional Chinese mansion as well with some beautiful artwork. Here’s a blog post with many photos of the houses.

There are signboards explaining the history and architectural significance of many of the buildings. It’s worth reading the signboards. There’s some WW2 history in a number of these houses, with some houses being used by the Japanese during the war, and another signboard speaks of the owner helping out POWs and sabotaging the Japanese. The signs also pointed out some nice aesthetic details I would have missed otherwise. A few of the houses have museums but none were open when I was there.

(There was also a general store with a display of products they carried back in the day, including the original packaging of the popular Asian toothpaste brand Darlies. This blew my mind. Maybe you don’t want to know? Maybe you already know and I’m just late to the party. I won’t say more here, as I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but you can google it I guess.)

The sun was super bright when we went around 10am so we came back for a late afternoon stroll when we could enjoy the scenery more and get some decent photos without going blind.

Morning is maybe a bit more happening though. On one of the corners (here?) was an old lady selling delicious kanom krok (coconut cream pancake cupcake things) with a nice char on the bottom. On another corner was a stall selling a variety of rice dumplings, great stuff! They weren’t there in the afternoon, and some of the cafes had already shut when we came back, though there’s plenty of other food sold here, with different stuff at different times of the day. In the late afternoon we ducked into a cafe in an old house called Secret Treasure and got some kombucha.

At the end of the road is the gateway and part of the old city walls. Not that exciting, but worth seeing if you’re a history nerd like that. There are some old government buildings on the perpendicular lane. One lane over towards the river (which has the Saturday night market) is a sky walk, which was very busy with tourists when we drove by. The views didn’t seem that exciting to me so I didn’t do it, but it could be fun around sunset.

We went to two great markets in the area: Mueang Kanchanaburi Fresh Market in the morning (very happening in the whole area, lots of food stalls, and somewhere on the road nearby I got fried pineapple which was pretty amazing, I highly recommend it even as someone who thinks fried foods are very overrated) and Chukkadon Market in the late afternoon (also very happening), before walking back to Pakprak road, passing the old paper mill and the fun, kitschy Wat Chai Chumphon Chana Songkhram on the way (don’t bother with the small WW2 museum there). 

In the evening we grabbed some toast and custard from Tiam ai ko, which is right across from the main temple, Wat Thewa Sangkharam. There’s a large Chinese temple complex next to it. Lots of nice sights around here, good for an early morning or evening stroll (and if you’re there on a Friday night, the floating market is in this area). 

Unfortunately, the building at Wat Thewa Sangkharam with old murals was closed for renovations, but it will probably be open by the time you read this. They look awesome. A description from Lonely Planet: “the murals in the old ubosot (chapel) from the King Rama III-era (r 1824–51) are in excellent condition and have fascinating scenes of local life plus a comical surprise in the southeast corner.” 

A comical surprise?!?!?! I’m guessing it’s the following (translated from Read the Cloud, scroll down about 40% for a photo, and spoiler alert!): “A striking feature is the depiction of a person reaching out to pull a colored strip between two walls inside the old chapel. This was because, after the painting was completed, the artist was unable to fit the two strips together. The solution was to depict a person reaching out to pull them together, a solution that amuses onlookers.” Here are a few more photos.

As a vegetarian I don’t have much to say about the food here. If you aren’t vegetarian, maybe go take Mark Wiens’ tips on jungle food. I still ate well, though!

Some of the food stuff has already been mentioned. Saturday night market, Meena cafe outside one of the temples, a rice dumpling stall outside another temple, street food in the old town area, fried pineapple, etc. So see that stuff.

I chose to stay walking distance from On’s Thai-Issan Vegan, which is on the kinda yucky touristy street and is geared at tourists (quiet when we went for lunch, but packed when we went for dinner), but the food is delicious, healthy, and inexpensive. It’s similar to touristy vegetarian restaurants such as May Kaidee which I find in Chiang Mai and Bangkok but don’t see in most places I go. I like these places. Unlike the local J restaurants which have limited hours, this is open all day, and it has a big menu you can order from. I loved the banana flower salad and the lotus stem coconut milk curry. The larb wasn’t very larblike but I still liked it, a larb flavored vegetable stir fry, and “pumpkin hummus” is a yummy, mildly seasoned pumpkin mash. The only miss was the massaman curry, which I found too sweet, spicy, and Indian tasting, all at once. 

Most of my other meals were at local J places. All were good!

Sen J, in someone’s house in a space that doubles as a jewelry shop (!), is potentially my favorite, but it’s hard to say as the day I went they were closed because they were leaving for a vacation, but when they saw us arrive they said they’d make a quick lunch for us. (I tried to get out of it, I didn’t want to impose, but they insisted!) Unlike the buffet style J places, this was a la carte. The menu was limited that day, though, and I couldn’t get a lot of the more interesting sounding dishes. But we had a good, simple Thai meal. If you’re adventurous you can get the Isan style papaya salad with the vegan “shellfish” paste which they also sell. I loved it, but it is very stinky. My wife hated it, as she tends to with these things. 

From here we walked to the very nice Cinnamon Coffee (slightly more info below), and when we got hungry again we walked to Jit Sod Chuen, an upscale pad kaprow restaurant from a chef who won a pad kaprow competition. I liked our mushroom pad kaprow well enough but as a vegetarian I wouldn’t really recommend the place. 

I also went to two kind of standard buffet style J places near each other on the other side of town. We got to Jasmine by Mae Taew around 11am and almost everything was sold out! Their hours say 6am-2pm, but I wouldn’t plan to go after 10am. Good food, though, I liked the mushrooms in a tangy coconut sauce. We were still hungry so we walked over to Jekarn's Kitchen, which has hours of 5:30 am–1 pm. Plenty of food was available, all good. This was close to the very nice Pann Coffee, and in the evening there’s a soy milk stall โรงเต้าหู้เมืองกาญจน์ (โก้เล็ก) which was delicious. 

(We had a funny experience where the very friendly woman at the stall asked if we wanted the soy milk with or without sugar, and as we were discussing it she opened both bottles to give us a taste. We decided we’d take both, and she gave us both bottles she opened in addition to new bottles of each. We tried giving back the new bottles but she wouldn’t let us. We walked away with four bottles of soy milk, for the price of two.)

We worked from two cafes and both were very nice. Pann Coffee (near Jekarn’s Kitchen mentioned above) is a very cute and cozy place at a family’s home where the husband does the drinks and the wife does the baking. The coffee (from the owner’s friend/teacher in Rayong) was great quality and the owners were sweet and passionate. We weren’t in the mood for desserts but they looked and smelled great. Not ideal for working from space wise, but I’m glad we did anyway. 

We also went to Cinnamon Coffee, kinda near the bridge, which didn’t feel as personal, but it had nice, spacious seating. The house roasted coffee was very good and we got an excellent mulberry leaf pandan custard caramel toast. My only complaint is that they promote their homegrown organic produce, including eggs, and they encourage you to go meet the chickens and rabbits in the garden, but the animals didn’t look very happy or well kept to me, though I guess in relative terms they were better than most. 

And one morning we grabbed a quick coffee from a roaster near the old town called Kuawtong Coffee, which was cute and felt like someone’s living room.

After hitting up the Saturday night market, I didn’t feel there was anything very interesting to do on my subsequent nights, so on one free night I decided to go to the movies! We went to the Major at TMK Park. It was a nice theater, with good projection. I would go back! The mall it was in seemed like it might have been happening in the day, but it was pretty dead when we got there around 7, and it was downright creepy when we got out of the movie around 9. Most of the lights were off, the escalator was turned off, and it felt abandoned. 

I did snap a few photos of old single screen cinemas in the town that remain standing, but I couldn’t find any information about them. The Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project has some info about theaters in some nearby small towns. 

Erawan National Park

I don’t have much to say about Erawan national park (about an hour drive from Kanchanaburi town, though we went from Sai Yok, which also took a little over an hour). It’s very beautiful. Recommended if you want a gorgeous and easy hourish long hike on an established trail with plenty of waterfalls to look at. It was a bit crowded on a June weekday, though. Not somewhere to go if you want the place to yourself. We got there around 11am and regretted not getting there an hour or two sooner. 

Many recommend the further away national park which is less crowded. Probably better, but I didn’t care enough to go so far. 

The name comes from the rock at the waterfall looking sort of like Erawan the three-headed elephant. Another noteworthy waterfall here is Ok Nang Phee Sue, which translates to The Ogress’s Breast, named after the ogress from the Thai literary classic Phra Aphai Mani. I haven’t read that one yet but it is a major life priority. I couldn’t find out when these were named.

We stopped at two bad coffee places on the road to and from the park, one was Huda (cute stop but terrible coffee), another was Amatala (not as bad but still bad, and expensive and the place isn’t that nice). We’ve never had such bad luck with coffee in Thailand. Go with one of the others nearby.

Sai Yok

Sai Yok (which google’s spell check really thinks should be spelled “Sai York”) is a district in Kanchanaburi province around an hour by road from Kanchanaburi town, and the tiny town of Nam Tok has a train station, the last on the line which starts in Bangkok and runs through Kanchanaburi. We had come out here by car from Bangkok and took a train back to Kanchanaburi, and another train to Bangkok a few days later. 

I definitely recommend taking the train between Kanchanaburi and Sai Yok, it’s an exciting, adventurous route! Among Thailand’s finest. (I guess I should thank the Japanese?) I did wish we had a car, though, as there were a lot of things to see in the region, but cabs were very expensive and I’m afraid of bikes. We rented a bike for a day to get around and I was terrified the whole time.

A lot of people visit Sai Yok as a day trip, which is fine. But there are a lot of nice places to stay along the river, which seems to be the point of coming. The views are amazing. We stayed at Baan Pufa Resort, a pretty place with a fancy cafe and a space you can sit and dangle your feet into the fast moving river. One day we hired a boat to take us to a calmer part of the river where we could swim a bit. In summer the trees were full of the wonderful smelling luk chan fruit, but they were too astringent to taste good.

We didn’t do a ton around here. We walked through the town, which I enjoyed. Not remarkable, but I found it charming. There are some cute old wooden houses near the train station. Drowsy Coffee served great coffee. We got excellent durian at a random shop in some inner lane parallel to the station (we got durian from a few other places selling on the highway, all with their own farms nearby, mostly Monthong or Puangmanee, but this was the only very good one). Picked up banana and pomelo and santol from various stalls. Good noodles at Bannok Noodles restaurant. 7/11. That’s about it. We never woke up in time for the morning market, but went to a great afternoon market around five minutes away (maybe here?) but I’m not sure if it’s open every day. 

Near the town is a small waterfall, Sai Yok Noi Waterfall, that isn’t that exciting, but you can check it out. There’s an old Japanese train car there to see, and the train actually runs here for special train rides on weekends and some holidays. After this the track was dismantled. More than any of that, I enjoyed the market set up across the road. They have fresh fried chips of various varieties (sweet potato, taro, etc), lots of good fruit, bamboo sticky rice, etc. Sadly the durian we bought was slightly underripe. Nearby we went to the Yok Noi Coffee Camp, a cute place in a pretty area with pretty good coffee that they roast themselves. 

The main attraction around here is the Hellfire Pass, said to be one of the most challenging and brutal stretches of construction on the “Death Railway,” and its associated museum, the Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre, run by the Australian government and free of cost. Highly recommended, it’s very well done and informative. 

The museum is fairly small, maybe taking half an hour, and then there’s a trail through the pass. You can choose the short trail or the long trail. We did the short trail but regretted not doing the longer one since the short one takes hardly ten minutes. I’m pretty sure the estimates they give for how long the trails will take are for senior citizens, not strapping young lads like myself. 

They give you a headset for the trail, but we returned them after the first stop since I don’t really like listening with headsets. I wish they had the same information via text as it seemed interesting and informative. With that said, I didn’t feel I needed more info, the museum sets the trail up well enough, and it’s a touching experience to be out there without any interruptions. 

Also, though it’s grim subject matter, the area is really beautiful, and it’s full of super cute fuzzy caterpillars. There are signs informing you not to touch them, and it requires significant willpower to follow that advice. They’re just so adorable.

Outside the museum is a little food court where we had a nice lunch of simple Thai food. On the way to the museum we stopped at a cafe called Barnyard, a cute place with a number of cats, run by a sweet lady, though the coffee was just okay. We contemplated driving out to the beautiful looking riverside matcha cafe Hua Cha Tea House, but it was way too far. We also stopped at a fun dragon temple, keep an eye out and stop there. We stopped and had an okay durian from one of the many stalls along the road, maybe you’ll have better luck than we did. 

I can’t say I have a good handle on Sai Yok’s food scene and you should take my recommendations with a grain of salt, but we ate at a really good restaurant called Sommai. The staff was friendly and understood our request for vegetarian food, with the help of google translate. There is an English menu but it seems more boring than the Thai menu. I recommend just going on their Facebook or seeing Google reviews and looking at photos and pointing at what you want. They have a lot of local specials, try to figure out whatever those are. My favorite dish was a roasted eggplant salad with boiled egg, simple but delicious. We also got good stir fried mushrooms (alas not the special seasonal wild ones which I didn’t feel like paying 400 baht for, but you can ask about those!) and jungle curry, which I’m generally not the biggest fan of (too spicy!), but I enjoyed leaving the broth and eating the veggies with rice. For dessert they give complimentary homegrown jackfruit! 

There’s plenty more in Sai Yok and Kanchanaburi in general, I’ll just have to take another trip…