Day 74: River Kwai Day Trip

One of the things that people recommend doing while in Bangkok is taking a day-trip west to Kanchanaburi, about 3 hours to the west. Aside from being a nice town, it's home to the famous Bridge on the River Kwai (which itself is part of the infamous Burma Railway or Death Railway). So we were pretty keen to check it out.

Very early start, with alarms at 6:15, breakfast at 6:30 and out of the hotel by 7am. We'd opted to do the tour ourselves rather than pay a local travel agent a huge commission for booking a couple of tickets. So we got a taxi to the train station, bought our tickets and by 7:45am we were on our way. The ride out was about 2 1/2 hours of fairly unexciting landscape, though I was sitting on the left-hand side of the train and that side tended to have the main road alongside.

We proceeded west and then north through the flat floodplain of central Thailand, with very little scenery to note. I listened to podcasts as usual and Shandos dozed (as usual) until we arrived at the Bridge around 11am. Funny story about it - the guy who wrote the book that the famous movie was based on had never actually been to the area. He just assumed that since the railway followed the River Kwai and it had bridges, that the most important of those would be crossing the river. But it actually wasn't - it was crossing a river called Mae Klong. After the movie came out and tourists started arriving to check out the Bridge over the River Kwai, it was a bit of an issue since technically it didn't exist! The problem was solved by renaming the local part of the Mae Klong to Kwae Yai (Kwai tributary). But once we arrived, I didn't feel like laughing.

We stepped off the train at a platform right at the start of the bridge, and into a tourist scrum like we hadn't seen since probably Prambanan temple in Jogja several months ago. Crowded, noisy, flag-following groups everywhere, selfie sticks waving around, huge tourist coaches jamming the streets, trinket stalls all over the place, people taking idiotic selfies everywhere.

And to top it all off, three carriages of the train we'd just departed from were now occupied by a huge group of Japanese 20-somethings on what looked to be a Contiki-style tour, complete with booze, awful Eurodance music, screaming and selfie sticks. I was absolutely infuriated - it's supposed to be a place of reflection and remembrance for the 10,000 Allied POWs and 120,000+ Asian forced labourers who died constructing the railway. This was ghastly. And that Japanese tourists would have a party here just seemed beyond the pale. I can't imagine American tourists having a spring break kegger in Hiroshima park.

But I swallowed my objections and moved on. We walked back and forth across the bridge a couple of times (it's completely safe as there's literally only 4 trains crossing per day), taking some photos as we went, and then headed for lunch around 11:45 since we'd eaten a seriously early breakfast. Cheap Thai food was the order of the day.

Afterwards we decided to check out the cemetery and Museum back in Kachanaburi itself, as we'd heard good things about both. It was a bit far to walk in the heat, but when we asked a man selling water where to get a tuk-tuk he gave us a lift in the sidecar of his motorcycle! He charged us 80 baht which was probably a bit much, but he was a nice old man and it was a pretty fun ride. He even took some photos of us pretending to ride it.

Happy to report that the hordes of tourists hadn't ventured to the museum (because of course they wouldn't). We paid our entry and spent about 90 minutes going through all the exhibits about the railway's construction and usage. The surprising part was that although 10,000 Allied POWs (mostly captured during the fall of Singapore) worked and died constructing the railway, the Japanese utilised a huge amount of forced labourers from neighbouring countries like Burma, Malaysia and Indonesia. Nobody knows how many forced labourers were used since the Japanese destroyed their records (although it's definitely over 100,000 people), but for me the worst part was that most of those people died and they've recovered exactly three (3) bodies. All of them unknown. Allied personnel were buried in marked graves, while the labourers got mass graves. Absolutely tragic, and even the museum seemed to gloss over it a bit.

After the museum we wandered around the cemetery in the park opposite the museum, which houses the remains of the British, Dutch, Australian and New Zealand soldiers who died on the railway. It was nice, but very similar to other Australian-funded military cemeteries (eg the one at Adelaide River we'd visited a few months earlier).

Back to the station where we got on the train a little after 3pm. It was a long and dusty ride back to Bangkok for the next 150 minutes; these trains don't have air conditioning so it's small ceiling fans and open windows. Not too bad unless you're in the sun. Taxi to the hotel where we had a quick dip in the pool (first time at this hotel and we've been here 3 days, must be a record), before showering and heading out for dinner at the same place as two nights previous.

Early night after a very long day!Read more