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KANCHANABURI
After an incredibly silent taxi journey to Thonburi station (Bangkok taxi drivers are suprisingly un-animated!) we bought our tickets for the 1.55pm standard to Kanchanaburi. The only trains to Kanchanaburi are the regular 'thai style' 3rd class which are just flat seats in a carriage with lots of ants and no airconditioning. The 3 hour journey was actually quite nice, staring out into strange little thai towns and paddy fields everywhere with the wind blowing through the window. The previous night we had ventured to a fancy Bangkok supermarket (or market hall as they called themselves) and bought two cans of tuna and a loaf of wholemeal bread! This became our lunch on the train and was really quite delicious. It was Good to have some simple western food after being buried in noodles, coconut milk and fried chicken for a month. I'm sure you'll be interested to know that Thailand actually has an amazing range of canned tuna varieties. We opted for the plain 'sandwich style' and ventured slightly with some 'tuna mayonnaise' which turned out to be just really plain tuna in a strange white sauce. Next time we might experiment with the green curry tuna, the shrimp paste tuna, or even the Masaman curry tuna. All sound amazing.
So after devouring our two cans of tuna, and hence creating a storm of ants around our seats, we arrived in Kanchanaburi at about 5pm. A short walk from the train station brings us to the 'backpacker stretch' along River Kwai road and after about an hour's trudging with heavy bags we finally found a place to stay, right on the main street. The room was remarkably clean and the nice thai family who run the place are always serving upon us with fresh towels and bars of soap and water bottles etc. they're very keen to impress as they just opened 5 days ago and we're some of their first guests. The first two days we stayed there it was just us and many relatives of their family, i guess celebrating the opening. (If anyones interested it's the "My home" Guesthouse).
After a nice sleep in on Saturday we headed over to the Thailand-Burma railway centre and the adjacent allied war cemetery. Kanchanaburi is home to the famous 'Bridge over the river Kwai', built by Allied POWs and conscripted asian labour during the second world war under Japanese rule. The bridge over the kwai is just one part of the 400 or so Kilometre 'Death railway' built by the same POWS and asian labour. The story goes like this: The Japanese had captured most of southeast asia, that is Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos etc and were allied with Thailand who declared war on the US and Britain. The Japanese needed a good logistical route to get things from Japan to Burma (usually via Bangkok) to continue their quest for world domination! The trouble with going via the usual shipping routes is that the allies controlled many of these in the Indian ocean and were proving a hassle for the Japanese. This is where the railway comes in. The japanese had a secure route through to Bangkok already and were missing this last section through to Burma and in effect India etc. So they decided they would simply build a railway from Bangkok, or near there anyway, into A City in Burma, a bit south of Rangoon, I can't remember the name. So it ended up that they moved tens of thousands of POWs, mainly Australian, British and Dutch, and even more asian labourers to these remote parts of Thailand and Burma and forced them to build the railway. Whilst this itself doesn't sound completely horrible, the japanese overworked the prisoners to a ridiculous extent while supplying them with barely enough food to survive and gave them literally no medical supplies or proper housing. This meant that thousands of prisoners died from now easily treated illnesses like vitamin defficiencies, cuts, malaria and even malnutrition. At the Museum there are lots of pictures of the prisoners who made me think of pictures of Jewish concentration camp survivors, that is, stick thin to the point where there bones are almost poking through their skin. Not very pleasant. So basically, hundreds of thousands of people died whilst building the railway. Along the Length of the project were about 60 POW camps and even more cemeteries for those who died there. Many of these graves were moved after the war, mainly to the main allied cemetery here at Kanchanaburi, and at another about 4km out of town called the ChungKai allied cemetery, and one in Burma also. Anyway, thats the basic story, I think most of what i just wrote is acurate, some bits might be a teeny bit off.
The Thailand-Burma railway museum was really good, lots of interesting artefacts and things from the POW camps, spoons, diaries, jars of Marmite, lots of shaving razors. It gave a really good background of the whole project and the people involved etc. After visiting the museum we moved on to the kanchanaburi war cemetery directly across the road. This was a really nicely kept cemetery, well looked after with lots of trees and plants and brilliantly manicured lawns (really very good lawns!). There are several thousand graves here, British, Australian and Dutch mainly. The cemetery was quite a sad experience, graves of 18 and 19 year-olds alongside 21,22,23 year olds and some just marked 'a soldier of the second world war'.
Didn't do much in the arvo, watched a few pirate dvds and some weird thai television (they have 'are you smarter than a 5th grader'!) and then had nice dinner at a place on the main strip. After dinner we headed over to street stall selling a range of different beers and thai spirits, including one bright red liquid which was said to be made from a range of different animals and that "the redder it is, the more animals are in it and the better quality it is". Deciding against the strange red liquid, We agreed that the value of the 10baht (35cents) whiskey n' coke just couldn't be matched by any of the beers available, and stayed there most of the night chatting to various strange foreigners. Miriam had a long conversation with a slovenian/slovakian/somethingorother woman who'd been travelling solo for the last 10 months. She says New Zealand was the worst place she's been so far! Gave us many tips bout good cooking courses to do and places to stay. I somehow got roped into conversation with two Irish guys on holiday. One of them lived in Bangkok and was showing his friend from Ireland around. The Bangkok irish was pretty nice, his brother lived in Melbourne and he had also been there many times, whilst his friend, I'll call him drunk irish, was a rather strange character who only got stranger as the night went on. Bangkok irish and I started talking about AFL and the International rules series and all the stuff about the AFL blokes being professionally paid, full time, and the Irish guys being amateurs who have to have another job. I was completely agreeing with what both Bangkok irish AND drunk irish were saying, but drunk Irish (in one of his moments of consciousness) didn't seem to realise this and started muttering about me being a 'smart little thing' or something like that. Bangkok Irish was obviously embarrased by his friends behaviour and as drunk irish began his lecture/mutterings about the treatment of the Irish and how they're always 'screwed' etc, we moved the conversation into the healthier topic of the nearby tiger temple which, contrary to many rumours and guidebooks, was apparently "very well run, they treat the animals well for sure, but i wouldn't be suprised if someone got attacked".
The next morning/afternoon I rented a little motorbike/scooter type thing from a shop on the main road. 24hrs for 200baht ($8). Once i'd filled her up with petrol (about $4) I headed up through town and across the bridge. As the rain very slowly began to fall I decided to head back to the hotel room to grab my rainjacket incase it got any worse. Back over the bridge, down the main road, round a corner, up another road, then I get to the last corner, only 30m from our hotel, when a small little Thai woman on a similar motorbike/scooter contraption manages to clip straight across into the side of me. I had turned the corner and straightened up to see this woman blindly staring off the right at something, eyes completely off the road, and by the time she had realised she was about 5m on the wrong side of the road, we were both on the ground! We had both smacked the brakes on and ended up hitting at a bout 2km an hour, just enough to topple the suprisingly heavy scooter. A bit of a shock and a scratch on my knee, but no physical damage really. The woman was fine too. The whole incident was rather embarrasing as it happened right infront of a row of bars so we had a nice little audience watching everything that happened in the aftermath. A nice english man of about 60 helped pick up the heavy bike and push it over to the curb and invited me for a beer. The Thai woman was very nice about the whole incident, realising it was her fault, and even went to the chemist to buy a bunch of first aid kit and fuss intensively about the small graze on my left knee! After she was satisfied, and i had about half a bottle of betadine and some weird thai antiseptic which stung like crap, she let me go and I had a drink with the english bloke and his slightly strange expat american friend. They both proceeded to tell me about how Thais really just wanted our money and that the bike rental shop would try screw me around and get heaps of cash from me to pay for the 'damages', a couple small scratches. The american fello also had some strange things to say about Thai airforce MIGs (some type of jet?) and exclamed the need to "keep the Moslems controlled down there". I say muslims with an O as he said it in that weird american way! Later that day I went for another ride out over the bridge again and checked out another cemetery, the Chungkai war cemetery where a few thousand more POWs are buried. This one was much like the main Kanchanaburi cemetery, yet right by the river in a much more peaceful location. The kanchanaburi cemetery is surrounded by bustling roads of motorbikes, trucks and buses. I also followed the strange expat's advice and went looking for a motorbike workshop to replace the front plastic section of my bike so as to avoid any hassles with the rental shop. After little success i realised it was a Sunday and that everything was closed, so decided to head back the next morning to a Honda workshop on the main road.
The bike was due back Monday 1pm so i got up at about 8am and rode around to he Honda shop. I arranged to get all the front panels and one of the side panels replaced for a mere 800Baht, about $30 and pciked it up at 1pm in all its shiny plastic glamour.
A day or two later we decided to head out to Hellfire pass, a particularly amazing (and fatal) section of the death railway. Rather than book into some daggy and expensive day tour, we ventured down to the bus terminal and got on a very colourful thai local bus heading towards Ratchantaburi. Hellfire Pass is about 90 mins drive from Town and we only just got off at the right place when we realised the driver was speeding straight passed it and ran to the front door!
Down a nice shady driveway, with its own paddock of emus on one side, we could have been in any Victorian country town on a nice summers day! Around the bend another 100ms brings you to the Hellfire pass memorial museum, opened by the 'honourable' John Howard a few years ago. We had to catch another bus ina bout 90mins so we had little time to explore the museum and instead headed down the many stairs towards the death railway track. The track was built along the side of a mountain and was really quite shady and cool. The surrounding landscape was amazing also with great views over the valley and surrounding mountains. A few hundred metres along the remains of the track brought us to the actual 'Hellfire Pass' cutting, a 60m long, 35 m high, 7m wide cutting straight through the rock-hard mountain side. Hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners died along this particular stretch of the track. The original 600 or so Australian prisoners sent to the area had to be replaced by another group of australian and british prisoners as the first group had been almost completely depleted.
The bus back to Kanchanaburi was particularly enjoyable and allowed us to see a bit of the real Thailand. We were the only foreigners onboard and played an hour-long 'peek-a-boo' style game with the very cute Thai toddler in the seat infront. One nice Thai girl got on about half way back to sell drinks (strange coloured liquids in plastic bags) and after introducing herself to us she told Miriam she was beautiful and then jumped off at the next stop, waving to us in the back seats of the bus!
That night we had a DELICIOUS spicy papaya salad for dinner from a street-side stall and went back again the next night!!
On Thursday morning we got up early and headed back to Bangkok on the same rustic 3rd class train we had come in, eating some tasty rice balls for breakfast from the papaya salad street stall, yuuuummmy!
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