Hey Petchaburi!

With a 5-day weekend ahead of us, I was at a loss of what to do. Ella and I were originally going to do nothing, as we were both pretty swamped with work. But determining to not let the holiday go to waste, we decided to take at least 2 or 3 days off. Looking online, I found some stuff for Petchaburi. A small town about 2 hours from Bangkok, it seemed to have a few things to do. So off we went with Dmytro to check out what's up with this place.

Color me pleasantly surprised. I guess because our expectations were nil, but I enjoyed Petchaburi a lot more than I thought I would. Considering you can get there faster than across the city at rush hour, it really should be included in more Bangkok travel guides and whatnot. I mean, you're not going to spend a week there without going crazy. But it makes for an awesome weekend getaway. 

After we arrived, we checked into the one of... two guesthouses in the entire city. It was already late afternoon, so we decided to just take a stroll around downtown and see what we could find. We found Wat Mahathat Worrawihan, though it's kind of hard to not. A tall, bleached, marble white temple in Khmer (Cambodian) style, it sticks out like sore thumb compared to the 1 or 2 story places nearby. It's a wat. Pretty, but you've seen one Thai wat, you've seen 95% of them.

Walking around, we didn't see too much else of note. Mostly just taking in the city, before stopping to get dinner. Because of the holiday, a lot of places were closed. We did find a duck noodle place, which turned out to be surprisingly good. It's not often you find duck, even in Thailand. It's more of a Chinatown thing. So this was a rare treat, and as always, was about $1 for a meal. Dmytro went a bit crazy and got a double helping with rice. Let it be known, he hates ducks.

So for the first proper day, we decided to rent motorbikes and check out the beach. The beach is only about 15km from the city, but I dreaded having to pay another 300b to corrupt cops along the way. Fortunately, and this is a big feather in Petchaburi's cap, there were cops along the way, but none decided to stop and extort money from the poor foreigners. So, that was nice. The beach, Chao Samran, was unique in many respects. First it was near empty, unusual for a holiday. Also, it was covered with tiny crabs. About the size of your pinky, they burrowed out holes by rolling the sand into little balls. So, the beach was covered with these little balls of sand, and tiny crabs that rushed into their holes when you approached. I managed to trap a bigger one by putting my finger over his hole, and he ran around in a state of panic trying to escape this giant, wondering where his hole went. So, let it be known that I terrorized the local wildlife. The ocean itself was surprisingly muddy. I was imagining bottling this mud and selling it for a killing in Seoul or something.

Back in town, we kept going on the bikes to look at Khao Luang Cave. Now, this place was impressive. I've always liked caves, but especially unique caves. This one was filled with monkeys (my nemesis!), and of course, buddha. But it had a lot of incense, combined with the holes in the roof, made for some really neat looking sunbeams to come down into the cave and illuminate different parts. I especially like this pic Ella took of me, but in general all the pics down there looked really neat.

Back on the road, we wanted to go see a coffee shop in the shape of a giant Cadillac, but it was closed. Instead we saw a sign for a cable car, which I was skeptical of. Turns out it is a real cable car, something I've never seen in Thailand. We took it to the top of the Mount Phranakhornkiri (Seriously... is this actually the name of it?). On top were more... monkeys. Ugh. Except at least they were a little cute, trying to open water bottles while tiny monkey babies clung onto them. This is the tallest mountain around, and has a well-maintained park along with, you guessed it, temples and palaces. Still, it had great views of the surrounding area, and we got some great pics.

It had been quite a day, so we went back to the hotel for some R&R. Not before picking up some Khao Soi, AKA the best Thai food in the world. Unfortunately, our guesthouse was right above a bar which decided to make some noise for the holiday. Probably the only bar in town, it kept us up the previous night. This time, we adopted the "If you can't beat them, join them" attitude and stopped in for a few drinks. That made sleeping much easier.

The next, final day was to Ban Pun Palace. Built by a German architect about 100 years ago, it was only briefly used by royalty. It was converted to various things, before sitting unused for a long time. Eventually some people decided "Eh, maybe we should let tourists in." So they fixed it up, and despite it being on a military base, let people check it out. It looks quite different compared to other things in Thailand, as to be expected for something designed by a European fellow around WWI. Overall, it was a typical big and drafty palace minus the unique spiral staircase. It had green marble columns, and looked sort of out of a fairy tale. But your imagination will need to be enough, as they did not allow photos inside. The outside is honestly 90% of the appeal anyway.

And that was mostly it for Petchaburi. We went to the train station to go back, and I was surprised that Dmytro had never been on a Thai train before. When it arrived, we got on, and oh wow. It was full of migrants carrying crates of goods, livestock, you name it. There was standing room only, and I was immediately regretting the four hour commute nestled between two chickens. Someone suggested we hop off and catch a bus, and we did moments before the doors closed. Back in the air conditioned van while snacking on honey roasted peanuts, eating the cost of a $0.90 train ticket sounded like a pretty good decision.