Where the Wonderfalls~

This weekend, we took a trip to Kanchanaburi, which is a province in Western Thailand! It was a really nice get-away from Bangkok, especially since we got to, yet again, escape the busy metropolis to be able to breathe fresh air, see greenery and rivers, as well as finally see some hilly views of the country!

After driving about 2 hours from Bangkok, we reached our first destination, Wat Tham Seua - which ended up being (yet another!) temple with a large, outdoor, golden Buddha that sat on a hillside and could be seen on our drive to and from there (so, from quite a distance away!). Since the temple was on a hillside, we got to see a lot of the farmland of Kanchanaburi that surrounded the great Buddha.

Love the detail on the rooftops, as well as the Chinese influence especially on this building, below.

After having lunch, we then briefly visited a cemetery of POW's (Australian, Dutch, British, U.S., as well as some Indian?) that lost their lives in Thailand. It was just crazy, reading some of the headstones, seeing some of the love from the family members of these fallen soldiers... some of which were SO young (around our age!) when they passed away.

So, the reason that a lot of these soldiers lost their lives as POW's in Thailand, was because the Japanese forces were putting them to work on an iron bridge for a railroad linking Thailand with Burma. Apparently 1 out of 4 POW lives were lost on this project, due to the really harsh working conditions.. etc that I don't want to really elaborate on..

Afterwards, we took our van farther up the river, to get on our..... RAFT!
Our accomodations for the night consisted of two conjoined raft houses - one was a two-story for sleeping, and the other had a kitchen and disco/karaoke area on it, for dining and partying purposes.

It was really nice to just go down the river on our raft house, feeling the breeze in our hair, water flowing peacefully, greenery on both sides of the river, the occasional motor-boat that sold everything stopping by and latching onto our ferry boat (like lamphreys on sharks, I felt like.. haha!) hoping to sell us stuff...

At night, we had a fun time karaoking to Thai and American songs, new and old, and dancing to a lot of American pop and techno-fused beats. We were definitely exhausted and didn't mind sleeping with the open air, hard wood floor, and blanket+pillow.

Once we had breakfast on the raft house, we headed off to... Erawan National Park!

This park had seven waterfalls, the highest one able to be accessed by an approximately 45 minute hike. Not going to lie... the path was pretty slippery with mud and some parts were pretty steep! But, it was SO worth it!
The two waterfall pictures above were only the 6th and 7th waterfalls (the two lowest-located waterfalls) of the park!

My friend, Dennis, and I went a little ahead of the group to hike up to the 1st waterfall, and were so amazed by how clear and blueish the water was up there! Although we were planning on just dipping our feet in the water, we couldn't resist (not to mention, we were pretttttty sweaty by that time!), and just took a complete dip into the water, which felt soooo refreshing and nice!

Definitely worth the trip. :)