TEFL intern weekends away: Kanchanaburi and Bangkok

How do you spend your weekends when you’re an intern teaching English in Thailand? Meet elephants, explore Bangkok and eat amazing street food, that’s what!

A three hour journey to Kanchanaburi on our first weekend away took us to the main backpacker street in the city. Full of hotels, hostels, guesthouses, restaurants, bars, convenience stores and massage parlours, you had pretty much everything you could want right there on the one strip! We met up with the Kanchanaburi interns and started swapping our stories from our first week of teaching. Hitting the town that night, we had our choice of dozens of bars along the road, reggae bars, rock bars, dance bars… you were pretty much covered, whatever you were into.

The following day the Ayutthaya group piled into a songthaew and went to Elephant World. At 2500 THB per person for the day, it was the single most expensive thing we did during our time in Thailand, but also the most worth it. I’m not even that into elephants honestly, but this was an amazing day. The elephants here were mostly older elephants that were basically living out a chilled retirement here after a life working in logging or carrying around tourists, and they were very well looked after. We fed them in the morning, went and helped to bathe them in the river, chopped up pumpkin and mixed it with a rice and corn mixture for them, had a buffet lunch ourselves, fed the elephants again them went back down to the river where we got to interact with them and wash them. It was a fantastic day, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Kanchanaburi. We hit the town again that night. I loved this town and I knew I was going to be coming back here to check out the other things to do around it.

Our second week of teaching saw us getting into our lesson plans and getting to know the students better. I’ll talk more in depth about the teaching in the next blog post. At the end of the second week, we all boarded a bus to Bangkok. Arriving in the capital, we could see how horrendously busy it was, and after taking seemingly forever to reach our hotel, we relaxed for a while before setting out to see Khaosan Road! I had heard of it in passing but didn’t really know what it was going to be about. It is a surprisingly short market street, but it is absolutely packed with stalls, food sellers, people trying to get you to buy suits (literally every ten feet) and lined with bars and restaurants of all different kinds.

We settled for a late lunch in an awesome looking Mexican restaurant after a solid hour of moseying around the market. The street is, as you can imagine, absolutely packed with westerners, flocking to the place like a pilgrimage.

We went back to our hotel to freshen up before heading back to Khaosan road to experience it at night, where it takes it up to eleven. You find all these restaurants transformed into bars/nightclubs and you’ll hear a different kind of music blasting out of every one. We went back to the Mexican place with was now apparently an alternative rock bar and we had an absolute blast. The street was even more packed with westerners, and now also joined by ladyboys, out there doing their thing.

Mid-recovery from the night before, we set out on Saturday for a tour of some of the temples around the city. We also found ourselves at the weekend market by way of getting ourselves across the city on the Skytrain. It was a desperately hot day and after many, many hours of exploration we headed back to the hotel, exhausted. After resting up we went for dinner on Khaosan Road and I called it a night. I had expected Bangkok to be crowded, hot, and full of westerners. It was all of those things, but I enjoyed it all the same.

Getting a bus home the next day was a mission due to a national bike ride event interfering with public transport. A long walk, a boat ride up river, a taxi cab and a minibus later and we were back in Sena, for another week of teaching…