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Blog on a River Kwai

Our final stop on DawnO’s 40th bday trip is a small town called Kanchanaburi. This is where the infamous bridge on the River Kwai is located. It was constructed by prisoners of war of the Japanese army. Once constructed, the bridge allowed Japan to expand its forces further west. Thousands of POWs and civilians died in in order to complete it.

I’m not certain but I don’t believe it is quite the bridge it used to be as this was made of metal. I believe the original was constructed out of wood. People are allowed to walk on it but trains still use it. There are platforms off to the side where people can stand out of harms way.

Near one end of the bridge is the WWII and Jeath Museum which only I visited. There was a sign at the entrance that claimed you hadn’t truly arrived in Kanchanaburi if you didn’t enter the museum… I guess DawnO is forever on the doorstep.

The museum was filled with old WWII relics and though it was pretty disorganized, it was worth a walk around. Where else would I find the following words of wisdom:

Kanchanaburi allowed us to check off another bucket list item. One of their forms of transportation is a scooter with a sidecar. Riding in a sidecar just happens to be on our list.

On our last day we took a day trip out to Erawan and hiked to a series of 7 waterfalls. Dawn convinced me to take my swimming trunks but I wasn’t sure I’d want to jump in the water. By the time we reached the final waterfall I suited up and took the plunge.

Thailand has been a lovely country to visit. We’ve enjoyed every day of our trip. Luckily the weather cooperated and we didn’t see too much rain at all. We are leaving here wanting to return some day and see more. I asked DawnO to give me a rating out of 40 and she gave me a solid 40 so I guess the surprise birthday holiday was a success.

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Charlie Bucket List

Most of you know that DawnO has a bucket list that seems to grow at the same rate we check things off. When I began planning her birthday trip, it was the first thing I looked at for inspiration. It is quite an eclectic list but there was one item in particular that stuck out:

  • snuggle a baby elephant

This is how I decided on Thailand. This country has many Elephant Sanctuaries to choose from, although none would guarantee an “X” on DawnO’s list.

I booked an overnight trip that promised a home stay at a local Karen village, a hike to a waterfall and exclusive time with the elephants without the crowd that comes with the 1 day tour. We were quick to discover that the online description was not exactly what we would get. The “home stay at a local Karen village” turned out to be a group camp with 11 other tourists. The furthest we would ever hike was about 200 meters between our truck and a lunch site with other tour groups. This was slightly disappointing but the experience with the animals was still worth it.

We spent day one with about 25 other people interacting with a family of 6 elephants. There were 2 younger elephants (named Lady GaGa and Rhiana), but both were a bit big for a proper snuggle. We fed them bananas, sugar cane and “medicine” made up of bananas and rice. DawnO and I each got a kiss from and elephant, which is about as weird as a giraffe kiss. Basically the elephant uses his trunk to suck on your cheek making the sound of a raspberry while leaving behind a slobbery wet spot.

Next on the itinerary was a mud bath followed by a rinse in the nearby creek.

The evening group camp was not too far from the elephant camps. We were able to escape the others and do some exploring while our delicious Thai food was being prepared.

Day 2 involved a trip to another elephant camp which included the mud baths. Afterwards we went to a cascading river (I think this was supposed to be the “waterfall”) for lunch and then spent some time with an elephant away from the large crowds. This girl was a hugger.

Our tour was almost over but we had one last stop to make before we headed back in to Chiang Mai…

…meet Charlie

This handsome young man is a 1 month old male that was shy at first, but eventually warmed up to a snuggle.

  • snuggle a baby elephant X
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Łòdź

Welcome to the Łódź blog.  Pronounced “Wooge” (Rhymes with Scrooge), Łódź is located in the centre of Poland.  It is not a huge tourist spot which made for a welcome change in pace after we left Kraków.
 
We rented an amazing apartment on Piotrkowska Street, which happens to be the longest street in Europe.  It was full of outdoor patios and shops that were never short on charm.
So why were we visiting Łódź?  Two years ago when DawnO walked the Camino de Santiago, she did so with a group which included a Łódź local, Maciej (you can call him “Matt”).  When we told him we were going to be in Poland he insisted we visit him so he could show us his home city.  How could we resist?
The first order of business was to tour around all the local hotspots.  We told him we have a love of graffiti art so we got to see the following buildings:
Unfortunately you can’t go far in Poland without being reminded of the holocaust.  Maciej took us to the train station in Łódź where many people were sent to concentration camps all over the country.  The station is as it was in 1945, along with 3 original train cars that were used to transport the victims.
On day two, Maciej picked us up and took us out of town to a castle where we were transported to the Middle Ages.  Everyone was dressed in clothes from the days of yore.  There was a knight competition (not sure what that entailed as we did not get to see it), classic dancing to lute music, and an archery competition.  I felt a bit like Paul Rudd in the movie Role Models.  I kept akwardly calling people “m’ lady” and “kind sir”.
Sign translation: Talkative and Stubborn
Sign translation: He didn’t put the seat down
In the evening Maciej took us to his home where we met his wife and two kids.  They fed us so much food, including paella, which was delicious!
They kept giving Dawn surprises throughout the evening.  She received “real Polish Wodka”, presents from Maciej’s latest Camino, and a birthday cake!
To end the evening DawnO and Maciej retold stories about their time on the Camino and I could see how important their walk together was for them.  I was happy to meet another one of her group that walked with her in Spain.  I could tell she was in good hands.  I almost forgot… All of these stories we told while we drank mead from a horn flask.
This morning we got on a bus and headed for Berlin.  More to come…
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Auschwitz-Birkenau

Today we went to Auschwitz.  There.  I said it.  I have been toiling over how to even start writing a blog about one of the most horrific places I have ever visited.  Job one, done.
The infamous sign that greets you to Auschwitz I roughly translates to English as “Work shall set you free”.   It’s one of the many empty promises that were given to the prisoners of this concentration camp.

Originally, this was a Polish army barracks before Nazis took the camp over after they invaded in 1939. These are some of the only remaining pictures of concentration camp victims.

We toured around the outside of the camp and were taken into many of the buildings which were set up with displays of documents, photographs, and camp population/death statistics.  As the tour went on the exhibits became much more intimate.  Enormous piles of hair brushes, eye glasses, shoes, and even human hair were showcased to give us a sense of the countless number of human lives that passed through that miserable place.

Auschwitz I was known as a work camp, while a few kilometres away Auschwitz II-Birkenau was known as the death camp.
The first thing that struck me about Birkenau was the shear size of the camp.  Most of the structures have either been dismantled, like the wooden barracks, or destroyed, like the gas chambers.  The latter was demolished by the Nazis as an attempt to eradicate evidence of the mass killings.

 

When we decided to come to Poland it was obvious to me that we would visit Auschwitz.  I never gave it a second thought.  After we booked our tickets some people asked me why we would want to come here.  At the time I responded with the line that I’ve heard many times before.  If we don’t remind ourselves of the mistakes of the past, we run the risk of repeating them.

 

While that is true, I would be lying if I didn’t start asking myself that question.  It was hard to come up with an answer that didn’t feel like a cliché.  I was hoping that I would find my own answer once we visited the camps.  When prisoners arrived to the death camps all of their belongings were in the one suitcase they were allowed to bring with them from home.  These suitcases were taken to warehouses to be sorted and sifted though for valuables.  This section of the camp was referred to as “Canada”.  This was because they believed Canada was a land of plenty.  This story gave me my answer.  I visited Auschwitz-Berkenau to be reminded how lucky I am to live where I do in the time that I do surrounded by loving family and friends.  I hope reading this will encourage you to visit too.
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Non-Stop! Chicago blog

Welcome to a surprise blog!  Well it was a surprise for me but DawnO has had this weekend planned for quite a while.  She somehow secured tickets to Hamilton the musical in Chicago back in November after many different attempts.  I found out her plan on Thursday morning before we made our way to the Calgary airport.  Along the way we had a minor setback when our airplane had to make an emergency landing in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  There was a wiring issue and they were worried it could start a fire after the burning smell wasn’t going away.  Luckily we were on Westjet and they were amazing with how they dealt with the situation.  They provided everybody with pizza while they sent us a new plane.

Guess which one was gluten free.

We eventually made our way to our friends’ place in Chi-town and we got to meet their newest family member.  The last time we saw Nick and Meg they had a bun in the oven.  Now they have Maxine to keep her big brother Lou on his toes.
Saturday night finally arrived and we ate some Thai food before heading to the show.

How was it?  It was the best show I have had the pleasure to witness.  If you ever get a ‘shot’ to see this, don’t throw it away.  DawnO even thought it was great.  She said she would love to go again.  That’s a pretty strong endorsement.

On Sunday we joined Nick and Meg for a Cubs game at Wrigley Field.  They destroyed the Brewers which helped the atmosphere.  Baseball crowds are always entertaining, but it certainly helps when they are drunk and happy.

On our last day we finally got a blue sky.  Nick and Meg were at work so we toured the city on some bikes.  We made our way along the bike trails that border Lake Michigan and eventually found our way to the giant bean!

 

All-in-all DawnO deserves the wife of the year award for planning such a huge trip.  If you are wondering, I have one planned for her in the coming months so stay tuned.

 

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For Fès Sake

A few days ago we made our way to Fès on a long bus journey followed by a personal taxi that our host in Fès set up for us.  As we pulled up to a large metal gate in a skinny dead end alley, our driver informed us that our building was a palace at one time.  Though this sounded impressive, we didn’t fully understand what we were about to see.

Above is a shot of our courtyard.  There are suites along either side of the courtyard, all varying in size.  We have a nice room with a private bathroom and even an upstairs kitchen.

It took me a while to get used to our winding streets so DawnO has taken the helm and has done a great job navigating.

Yesterday we joined up with some friends from home who happened to be in Morocco. We hired a taxi for the day to take us out to Volubilis, an old Roman city full of ruins and well preserved mosaics.

The next stop was Moulay Idriss, home to the tomb of Mr. Idriss, great-grandson to the prophet Mohammed and the founder of Morocco’s first real dynasty.  Every August it is the focus of a great pilgrimage.

We had our own pilgrimage trying to find the place where we could get a panoramic view.  We were determined to not use a guide and it ended up costing us about 30 minutes of unnecessarily walking uphill.  Eventually, a local “guide” showed us the way so we could get these shots:

Pictured above is the Mosque and the Mausoleum (green pyramid) of Moulay Idriss.

We have a couple more days in Fès before we make our way home.  Which will include a visit with our friend Jente in Amsterdam!
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Water buckets and bucket lists

We have spent the last two days doing excursions outside of Marrakech.  Yesterday we went to the coastal town of Essaouira.  It was a welcomed change of pace from the big city.  The weather was beautiful, the noise was minimal and we had room to walk along without dodging donkeys, scooters and shoppers.
When we got back to the city we had what I might call an awkward couples hammam.  If you are long time readers of our blog you may remember a post I wrote about a rather awkward, yet amazing Turkish bath experience…  See ‘Bloggle Bloggle” for the full story.   Consider this hammam experience to be along the same lines.  If you don’t already know, a hammam is when you, a consenting adult human, allow an adult stranger to wash and scrub your almost naked body until your top layer of skin comes off.  Sounds pretty normal so far, right?  Well, the place we are staying at has a hammam so we thought after a nice day at the beach, we would come home and get a good scrub down.  We booked it and at the time I wondered, if the hammam was in our place, does that mean one of the 3 staff members gets the lucky job of hosing me down?  Would it be bachelor number 1? The manager with a twinkle in his eye?  Bachelor number 2?  The guy that can’t speak English but is fluent in all things French? Or the lady that has been cleaning our room for the last 3 days?  I had convinced myself that they probably hired outside help for that job.  Well what a jerk I was.  Not only was it the lady that was up to the task, but she was taking us both on in the same room.  Now I’m not sure how a threesome is supposed to go, but I’m certain what I saw in that room was not a show I ever need to witness again.  When she was washing one of us, the other one was sitting on the smallest stool in the world I’d like to call the stool of the scary truth.  It was so hot.  Like temperature hot.  We were down to our underwear and she was wearing pants.  The most awkward moment for me was when I was getting scrubbed a bit too vigorously and I made a face, revealing my comfort level all while locking eyes with my wife of ten years who looked like a freshly washed hot-pink convertible with her top down.  And the most amazing part?  The lady didn’t even get her pants wet.
Today we took our clean selves to Ouarzazate, a city south of the High Atlas Mountains.  It has been featured in many films and even has its own movie studio.
We also visited Aït Ben Haddou which can be seen in Lawerence of Arabia, Gladiator, and Game of Thrones.

DawnO and I have a bucket list.  While Dawn adds things to it well in advance, I find it hard to add items to the list.  I usually see or do something and then afterwards say, “That goes on the bucket list! Check!”  What I saw on the way to Essaouira was put on the list once we knew it was a thing.  We actually only booked this trip because we heard we might see this mind blowing sight.  Ladies and gentlemen, we give you goats in a tree:

Props to Peggy Nelson for telling us that this was even a thing.

Apparently the goats climb the trees to eat the nuts that grow on them.  Bucket list item, check!

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When life hands you a lemon, paint that shit gold

  KA-CHUNG KA-CHUNG KA-CHUNG!! 

  That was the sound that kept repeating in our hotel room this morning after we had a solid two hours of sleep.  It sounded like someone was banging on our wall with a pipe and there was no stopping it.  After calling the front desk it managed to fade away, only to return again an hour later.  This continued for the rest of the night until our alarm went off.  We felt like the walking dead as we made our way to the front desk to ask for a new room.  Luckily they could switch us so we went about our regularly scheduled day like a couple of champs.  

  First we rented a car and proceeded to take a few wrong turns…  This wasn’t going to stop us though.  We recalculated our route and began our golden circle tour.
  We started with the Geyser which shot its payload 30 meters into the air around every 5 minutes.  It was pretty impressive and it always got cheers from the steady crowd of tourists who were watching, cameras in hand.

The next stop on the tour was the Gullfoss Waterfall.  This is where our day started to turn around.  The sun finally made an appearance so we ended up taking a lot of beautiful pictures:

  We even managed to make it back to the Geyser and get a video of the event against a blue sky.  It was at this point that we realized that we could have called off the trip, stayed in bed, yelled at the hotel staff, or any combination of the above.  Instead we sucked it up, acted like calm human beings and were rewarded with a beautiful day.  By mid-day we were awake, happy, and had all but forgotten the sound of KA-CHUNG, KA-CHUNG, KA-CHUNG.

  Here are a few more random shots from our self guided tour:

That’s all for now, time to get a good night’s rest in a room on the other side of the hotel…

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Chichen Itza, chicken pizza

We did it!  Another successful holiday that include checking something off our conjoined bucket list.  A new wonder of the world has been visited, which makes it 5 for DawnO and only 4 for me.  I can now say I have been to Chichen Itza, but I can’t say I climbed it.  We got there a few years too late for that.  My mom reminded me that she got to climb the stairs before they banned tourist from reaching the top of the temple.  I wonder if she ever got a picture without any tourists on it…

We were quite happy with our tour.  It included a trip to the cenote, Ik Kil.

We also got to eat a buffet lunch and stop at Vallidolid, a small town near Chichen Itza.

Have you ever seen the old SNL commercial about the love toilet?  We found some chairs in the town square that reminded us of it.

Today is our last full day in Mexico.  We spent our time cooking authentic Mexican dishes, going to the beach, and most importantly, eating authentic Mexican dishes.

We hope to bring home some sunshine and warm weather, but until then we have some rum to finish off before we leave our place tomorrow.  We will blog again in March from Iceland!

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ROMA AMOЯ

Since our last blog, DawnO and I have explored Rome and we have captured some pretty nice shots of the city.

Neither of us are very good at doing tours because we are either too cheap, or we are just not that interested. This time we downloaded some free audio tours on DawnO’s phone and it has helped our enjoyment level immensely.  I think we must look like siamese twins because we can’t stray too far from each other or we’ll end up clothes-lining some unsuspecting tourist with our headphones.

We went to Vatican City, and I didn’t combust on entry as I thought I might.   It was an interesting pageantry of wealth and power, I suppose.  It’s still not my cup of Kool-Aid though.  Highlights include the Raphael room, and the amazing Sistine Chapel.  This made the crowds worth it.

We have been taking full advantage of the Italian cuisine.  DawnO enjoys her nightly limoncello, and I have been spoiled with gluten free pasta, pizza, and the occasional beer.

We listened to audio tours of the colosseum and the forum which were both impressive.

We have one more day to enjoy the city before we leave for Cinque Terre.  I’ll leave you with some parting shots.

Boom!