Kanchanaburi

We have, not for the first time, been too busy to write. We are back in Bangkok from a two-day trip to Kanchanaburi, site of the infamous "Bridge Over the River Kwai." We went there by train, an experience in itself because the only train from BK is a very slow, old, no air-con local that took nearly 4 hours (supposedly 2 1/2) to do 150 km. With the temp at 35 C and the humidity at 95%, ALL the windows were open and it was smoky, dusty, dirty, still incredibly hot, and despite all that great fun: a real chance to see the countryside and NOT be travelling like a tourist.

Kanchanaburi is a quiet, pretty town by the river in flat rice-paddy countryside, ringed by low mountains. It's very hard to get your head around the fact that 65 years ago it was a slave labor camp. We rented bikes and visited two different POW cemeteries, both beautifully maintained, containing the graves of several thousand British, Dutch and Australian POWs who worked on the Burma railway and died of malnutrition, malaria, beri-beri, abuse and sheer overwork here. There are two excellent museums - where the point out that the POWs at least got graves (mostly) and were only about 10% of those who died: a vast force of slaves from the new Japanese territories, mostly men pulled off the streets in Malaya and China, worked and died here too and have almost evaporated from history. The conditions on the railway were simply beyond belief. There is a bar graph in one of the museums illustrating how many men of each ethnicity / nationality died, done entirey in iron railroad spikes recovered from the jungle.

On our second morning we walked across the bridge itself, which was bombed by the allies in 1945 and then repaired after the war. You can still take one of the trains that run on it up the line to Hellfire Pass and the Burmese border.