Nuts and Bolts: Travel Tips for Kanchanaburi, Thailand
- Rand Blimes
- May 2
- 6 min read
Updated: May 3
This page has some travel tips for Kanchanaburi, Thailand, to aid in planning your own trip. Remember, we are a family of five, and we travel mostly to eat. We were in Kanchanaburi in 2015. If your trip to Kanchanaburi is significantly longer/shorter/with a different focus, you may have a very different experience.
The gentle rocking of my bed woke me from sleep. I opened my eyes, looked around the small, wooden room I was in, and realized it was not my bed that was rocking. It was my bedroom. The whole place was gently swaying up and down.
I swung my feet over the side of the bed, and quietly (you do NOT want to wake my wife up before 8 AM!) walked to the door at the back of our room. I opened it and stepped out.
I was greeted by gently passing, chocolate colored water and the purple blooms of dozens of water lilies.
We were staying at VN Guesthouse in Kanchanaburi, a floating hotel right on the river. Our room was gently bobbing in the wake of a large passing boat. I sat down on the small porch looking out at the passing water, watching the gloom of early morning fade away into a crisp and clear day.
It was quiet. And peaceful. And beautiful. Kanchanaburi is a good place to be.
Getting to Kanchanaburi: Never Trust a Confused Taxi Driver!
In theory, it is very easy to get from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi. It is a short and fairly pleasant train ride. The tricky part is that the trains to Kanchanaburi don’t leave from Bangkok’s main train station, Hua Lamphong.
You can hop in any taxi in Bangkok, say “train station” and get to Hua Lamphong.
But to get to Kanchanaburi, you need to leave from the Thonburi Station (Bangkok Noi) station. These days, you don't need to be able to communicate your desired destination to a taxi driver, because you can just use Grab. But this was 2015, and Grab didn't exist yet.
It turned out to be a bit tricky to get our taxi drivers to understand where we wanted to go, and it didn't help that the heavens opened up and started drenching us as we tried to speak with the drivers.
We were split into two groups. One group: me, two of my daughters, and one of my daughters’ friends visiting from California (kudos to parents who let their kids travel!). The other group: my wife, another daughter, and two of the students who were in Bangkok with us.
Just as we started looking for taxis, rain began to fall. Hard. Really, really hard.
So I ended up sticking my head into multiple taxis while my daughters and their friend sheltered under an overpass. My wife and her group had already gotten into a taxi, but it hadn’t left. It just sat there.
After two taxi driver had just given up and left us there, not understanding where we wanted to go, I finally got the driver to understand. However, he told me he didn’t want to go there (taxi driver only like to make very short trips in the rain--they make more money that way).
Finally, I found a driver who understood where we wanted to go, was willing to take us there, and even agreed to use the meter! We got in and drove away.
My wife and her group? Still sitting in their taxi.
TRAVEL TIP: If a taxi driver seems confused about where you want to go, DON’T LET HIM DRIVE AWAY WITH YOU! Just get out and find another.
My wife probably would have done this under normal circumstances, but a downpour has a way of convincing you that anything out of the rain is OK. So she let the taxi head off. He took them the wrong way. They missed the train. (You can read about her adventures here.)
My group made the train. It was a nice ride, except for the hour-long break in the middle of nowhere. Something must have broken down because a new locomotive rolled up, the whole train jolted violently, and then we were on our way.
At Kanchanaburi station, songtaews were waiting. We bargained really hard. They let us walk away down the road before finally agreeing to our price and picking us up.
Travel Tips for Kanchanaburi, Thailand: Sleeping and Eating
We stayed at VN Guesthouse, A nice backpacker’s place (meaning we thought it was great, but if we were given the same room in the U.S., we’d probably think it was grungy). If you’re used to backpacker spots, you’ll like VN.
We got two triple rooms in the floating part of the hotel for 500 baht each.
VN has a restaurant with edible but not great food. More convenient than delicious.
We had a fantastic meal at Blue Rice, including maybe the best massaman curry I’ve ever had. Sadly, Blue has closed since.
There’s a night market near the train station with typical Thai street food.
We avoided the bar district, other than walking through it out of necessity. It was always full of creepy older men eyeballing everything young and female. It was also fairly loud at night. Keep that in mind when choosing a hotel.
What To Do
The Bridge on the River Kwai and the Death Railway
During WWII, prisoners of war taken by the Japanese were forced to build a railway linking Thailand and Burma. Conditions were abysmal, and the death rate shockingly high. The bridge near Kanchanaburi was immortalized in that movie where Obi-Wan Kenobi marched around whistling the song from Breakfast Club.
The original bridge was destroyed, but today you can take a slow train across the new bridge and along what’s known as the Death Railway.
The train journey itself won’t show you much about the past unless you take the time to think about it. In Kanchanaburi, visit the Thailand-Burma Railway Centre and the cemetery where many of the soldiers who lost their lives are buried.
To plan your Death Railway trip (and any trip involving a train), check the Man in Seat Sixty-One.
At Nam Tok station, the end of the line, you can walk to a waterfall ("nam tok" means "waterfall") and splash around before finding a ride back to Kanchanaburi in one of the vehicles waiting for train passengers.
The bridge itself is a nice walk. About 3 kilometers from the town center. There are platforms spaced out across it to take refuge from passing trains. Trains come very, very slowly so you should have more than enough time to get out of the way unless you have exceedingly bad judgement and are also a little drunk. Hold on to small children—famous for bad judgment but hopefully not drunk—as some sections have no rails.
Hellfire Pass
For a deeper understanding, visit Hellfire Pass, where POWs blasted the railway through the rock. You can take a self-guided walking tour. Reach it by bus or hire a driver.
Erawan National Park
It is a fairly short drive from Kanchanaburi to Erawan National Park, where you can hike to a series of waterfalls. The combination of beautiful scenery and the ability to swim under an amazing waterfall to escape the Thai heat would be enough to recommend this place all by itself. But you can also chase a bit of low-key adventure by sliding down many of the waterfalls.
And you may even be able to get a free “fish spa.” If you just dangle your feet calmly in the water in most of the pools, small fish will swim up to you and devour all the gross, dead skin clinging to your feet. Pleople pay for this in Bangkok, but at Erawan you get it for free (whether you want it or not—those little fish can be relentless). A word of caution: it tickles like crazy.
As an additional note, when we visited Erawan in 2021, all swimmers were required to wear life jackets. You can pick up a life jacket at the bottom of the hike.
We really enjoyed Kanchanaburi. The food was great. Staying in a floating hotel made evenings very atmospheric. And the day trip to Erawan was a trip highlight for us.
So go to Kanchanaburi and learn something about history. Because travel.
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