Floating Market & Bridge on the River Kwai Combo

The sights we visited- the floating market and the museum, cemetery, and river- were interesting and worth seeing. Unfortunately, the tour itself was confusing and disorganized. In the morning our minibus drove for over an hour, nearly all the way to the floating market, before any guide met us or explained the plan for the day. There were no clear explanations of what we were seeing and we then all switched buses/guides. The second guide announced that we would drive for an hour to the lunch venue in Kanchanaburi, but the drive ended up taking two hours, at which time we were dropped off at a restaurant without instructions on when lunch would be over or what we were doing next. While in Kanchanaburi, the guide did not provide much explanation or context to what we were seeing. We ended up looking up the sites on Wikipedia to get some background information. But the most disturbing part was the surprise visit to an animal park in between the floating market and Kanchanaburi. This stop did not appear in the itinerary of the trip I booked. If I had known that the trip included this park I would have looked for another tour option. The park had young elephants confined in small pens, monkeys dressed in clothes doing tricks, and other “attractions” that made me question the way the animals there are treated. Another disturbing aspect was the guide told the group before we arrived at the park that she did not want to hear any concerns for the elephants’ welfare, as she was focused on the needs of the people who made a living from the park. I thought this comment was dismissive. We ended up spending over an hour at this animal park, and those of us who chose not to go in had to sit outside in the parking lot for over an hour. This unadvertised and unwanted stop added an unnecessary delay in an already long day and took time away from the other sights and attractions that we had actually signed up to see. It was after 2pm by the time we had lunch and after 7pm before we returned to Bangkok- all of which could have been earlier without the stop at the animal park.