A few days out to honour the victims of the Burma railway
13th November 2005

Kanchanaburi, east of Burma
Our thoughts on the pointlessness of war
Why is it we are incapable of booking a hotel room?
Tigers, waterfalls, war monuments. What else?
A simple conversation gets me back on my quest for world peace

Trip to the River Kwai

We were so delighted to be getting out of town and cheered by being on the right side of town to start off with, that even the banditry of the local police (see previous epistle) failed to dent our spirits. There are jollier places to be going than Kanchanaburi, the site of the Kwai Bridge but, along with my desire to go and pay respects to those poor victims of Japanese railway building mania, the town is a good staging point for all manner of other things Thai. Hippy’s directions to me as we entered town rather reinforced my feeling of gravitas, “turn left after the cemetery”.

We’d chosen to stay at a small hotel that we had a telephone number for so that we could link up on a conference call with Hippy’s Mum and sisters the following day. Regrettably, as with all our plans regarding hotels, when we arrived there was actually no availability. Not to worry, there was a room for the following evening when we needed to hook up for the call and so we booked for the next night and night after and bumbled off to find somewhere for the meantime. About 50 yards away was a rather nice place with a restaurant looking down on a couple of large rafts converted into a floating hotel. The guide book - you all know which one by now - reckoned that these places down by the river were apt to get rather noisy at night with all the passing karaoke boats. There seemed to be no way of lighting the river and so we retired confident that no boats would navigate this stretch until sunrise .......... Our quest for dinner took us down where the karaoke barges were moored. There must have been a hundred at least. Trying to imagine the river carpeted with sweating singers belting out Frank Sinatra or whoever the Thai favourite is was quite appalling. Delightfully and unexpected, we passed the petanque pit. Yes, boules is alive and well and living in Thailand. The players seemed extremely proficient but I confess I am no great student of the game so I could be wrong.

For the first time in Asia we were acquainted with the Asian elephant, as a chap with a rather bedraggled looking, pachyderm, tried to persuade us to buy some sugar cane to feed the beast. As he guided it around by chain, I could not decide which was a sadder picture, the elephant or his owner who seemed so desperate to make a buck that he was ironically pricing himself out of the market. A few seconds later, we saw a much more wholesome scene with a youngish chap with his youthful elephant jogging free behind him. In fact he was moving so fast that he came out as a blur in the evening light. They are so light and springy for large creatures, and so small compared to proud African elephants, with a generally servile posture. I am sure in zoos at some point in the past I have seen both African and Asian elephants, but this was the first time it really struck me how small these ones are. Maybe neither were adults. What do I mean by a servile posture? OK they are trained, so they are bound to look servile, I hear you say. But it was more than that, they have small floppy ears rather than large erect ones, and their rear end drops down at the back making them look like they are slightly embarrassed by their size rather than standing proud and relishing the bonus of looking down on everyone else. The African elephant has an arrogance about him, and a look in his eye that he doesn’t really care what anything else thinks of him. I suppose I am being unfair, no doubt any beligerant Asian elephant has had his arrogance beaten out of him. The Thai and Burmese, have the reputation for being both the best and most brutal elephant trainers in the world. So much so that the Malays had to import Thai trained elephant to train their own, and apparently have had to continue to give instructions in Thai. They say the African elephant is untrainable but has a Thai or Burmese guy every tried?

There must have been somewhere in the region of one karaoke boat that passed our hotel at about 8 o’ clock. Thereafter we were more likely to be kept awake by some persistently noisy frogs - green hopping variety, that is. So much for the Lying Planet.

There was of course an interesting dynamic to floating on the river, that you went all undulatory every time a boat went past. Must be very confusing for those in their cups, but maybe one’s own undulations may counterbalance those of the room and the room stops swaying. Interesting thought. A person isn’t too drunk, the room is just too stable. Does that mean that drinkers make better sea-farers? Certainly many seafarers are big drinkers but I’m not sure of the logical causality.

We had a day to kill while awaiting consultations on Antcliff matters with Hip’s family and so we did the circuit of the in-town ‘death railway’ exhibits and received an education. An awful lot is clearer to me now. I won’t patronise the reader with the full story of the Burma Railway but I have to give a quick run-down of what occurred.

The Burma Railway

The Japanese, with some pretty sharp planning, simultaneously invaded Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma and bombed the Philippines and Pearl Harbour on the day they declared war on the US (8th December 1941). The was of the cock up the international datelines that although America had had warning of the bombings they thought is would be a day later or so it was claimed in a documentary Pat once saw. Personally I feel embarrassing uninformed about the world war in Asia. In short order they whupped our rather unprepared ground forces and airbases in the Burma/Malay peninsula, rounding off with taking Singapore. Realising that they needed a decent bit of infrastructure to hold all this together (seems Britania was still managing to rule the waves) they looked into completing the SE Asian rail network by connecting Bangkok to Rangoon. Although the Britsh had considered pretty much the same route during peace time and given it up as a bad idea, the Japanese railway engineers looked into it and figured that about 5 years would do to build it. The army allowed them 20 months or thereabouts. Initially no other labour than Japan’s own was to be used but as the deadline got moved up they initally marched in allied troops, mostly Brits, Ozzies and Dutch, and then topped up the labour force with local men who were at first tricked into working for the promise of good pay and latterly simply pressganged.

The railway engineers were running the show and came out of the museum exhibits as the bad guys. Seems they were pushing the whole thing along, but given that the deadline was set by the military and the price of failure would probably have been a bit nasty, 1,000 of the deaths being Japanese, they cannot really be singled out for the blame of what came to be one of the most atrocious abuses of human rights of all times. In all somewhere in the region of 115,000 men died in the jungle to create a 415 km stretch of railway that was in service for 15 months. I feel that the overworked phrase, “What a senseless waste of human life” just about sums up my feelings on this one.

We were aware of what had happened to the POWs. I guess an awful lot of people of our generation have known or at least met someone who faced this horror but managed to survive. What came as something of a shock is the forgotten history of the 250,000 odd Malay and Burmese who were conned or forced into labour. There are no records of what happened to around 80,000 Burmese who are thought to have escaped their captors into the jungle. Many of them no doubt never made it home safely. The accounts of treatment and conditions were harrowing at best, the account concurs that the Asians were generally treated even worse than the POW’s with official records showing that only half of those who did not ‘escape’, survived.

The POW’s are honoured in a beautifully manicured cemetery but there weren’t even any graves, let alone a memorial to the dead civilians from the surrounding countries. I know it is the responsibility of their own people to raise some monument but I’m not sure there was even a record of who was taken. What happened to the over 100,000 dead Asians, it seems sickening that it wasn’t even thought appropriate to mark the final resting places of all the bodies in the jungle.
In all their searching a pitful 3 Asian bodies have been found and they are unnamed.

Walking around the cemetry was a sombering experience, loking at the ages of the dead and the dates of their death.
.....age 25 years 10th December 1943
......age 22 years 9th December 1943
.....age 27 years 11th December 1943
....age 25 years
and so it went on...and on. All these lives cut short so early. When people decide to go to war or commit terrorist acts, do they think of all their victims as being people, with lives ahead of them and parents and maybe children to grieve for them. Personally before any leader decides he should go ahead with a war, a few moments in a war cemetry maybe enough to make them re-think. There has to be another option to human carnage.

There was a message in one of the guest books written by an Australian that caught my eye, “Wouldn’t have like to have to work here”. Seemed a bit shallow but also a great truth, simply stated. None of us would.

There was nothing overtly disrespectful that we saw in the town other than some tripper stomping out her fag in the flower bed around the graves in the cemetery but there was something of a seaside day out atmosphere compared with, say, Auschwitz. “Take a trip over the famous bridge guvvner?” I couldn’t help picturing it as a mound of bodies with a pair of rails running over it.

We need to know more about history but we were confused as to why the British had torn up 5 km of line after the war to make sure it was of no use to Karen terrorists and so of no use for anyone else for that matter. On reflection, it is quite fitting that mother nature has swallowed most of it up again. Just goes to show, we can do what we like to each other but the world will carry on, without us if need be.

Anther great SE Asia hotel management team

The Apple Guest House treated us as only an overpopular hotel can. Although we had booked in for 2 nights, they now claimed that they were fully booked for the second. Could have told us that the day before. We, in theory, were OK to recieve the family phone call, but then we were told, too late to change our plans and go elsewhere that unfortunately it wouldn’t be OK either because the reception shut at 9pm, and due time differences and BST we were expecting the call around 9.30pm. It was obviously more than their job’s worth to let us hang around reception to pick up the call. I have grown to dislike these sort of places; they are so popular and often booked up with tour groups that independent travellers like ourselves can be, and are, treated like dirt.

The phone call got sorted in an internet caff and, updated on family health, we resolved to move back to our rather more accomodating undulating raft house the following day. I had received a mixture of hopeful and bad news from home; the phone call had been such a good line, without the delays that often complicate international calls, that I had not felt like I was the other side of the world. But back in the room that night, I felt a very long way away indeed.

A curiously diverse day out

What to do to fill Hippy’s mind on the morrow. Waterfalls? Temples? Museums? Tigers?........ Tigers? Yes, just up the road from Kanchanaburi is a Buddhist monastery where they recieve orphaned tiger cubs and .... release them into the wild? .... breed them for their skins? .... sell them to security companies/film stars? I didn’t read the brochure so I can’t say for sure just what the exact purpose of their ‘save the tiger’ project is. So far as I could make out, a bunch of monks have pretty much domesticated the tigers that have been brought to them (being good men of the saffron cloth, they couldn’t really turn them away, could they?), allow members of the public in (for a handsome donation) to stroke them and have their picture taken with felines. One family had brought their toddler which immediately began to scream at the sight of the tigers. The ears perked up on one of the tigers, he could sense a snack in the making and the monk was clearly unimpressed, shouting something in the lines of ‘get that kid under control’. With only a feeble rope between us and eight tigers, you don’t want to piss them off. It was nice to see them frolicking about in the water, and play fighting with each other, they are such beautiful beasts, rolling over and being generally catlike. I approached to take photos of the beasts and got dragged into the petting area. No matter how much I protested that I only wanted to take pictures, I had my camera taken out of my hands and I was forced to sit down in tiger-stroking pose. It was all rather naff compared to having the dead skin licked off my back by cheetahs in Namibia. I was surprised at how nervous the handlers were with the tigers, I would have thought a masterful presence would have been more called for.

Hippy informs me that they have finally realised that they cannot really cope with a growing population of large predators. They are raising money to create a larger area with ha-ha to house young cubs in a more natural environment and introduce wild injured tigers (once fixed up, of course) to create some kind of school for wild tigers. I await news of a tiger successfully released to the wild with baited breath. I kind of felt a bit sorry for the monks, their buddhism not really allowing them to turn away animals in need, they had also become the home for a menagerie of wild boar, water buffalo, horses, cows, goats and peacocks. Clearly having a bunch of free roaming tigers rather creates a conflict of interests. Their only practical solution was to domesticate them. I wish them luck with their challenge of reintroduce tigers into the wild.

Tigers are still being poached for sale to those who believe that their body parts will make them into some kind of stud. There was a lovely article we saw in a Malay newspaper, that was telling people to stop wasting their money on tiger parts and switch to viagra, which is guaranteed to work.

On our way to Hellfire Pass we had a bit of a panic. There was a police check point. How stupid are we, this is the road to Three Pagodas Pass that leads to Burma; the route one takes to pick up a Myanmar passport stamp. It’s all bit of a sad one upmanship thing as you can’t go further than 1km into that fair (sounds quite unfair, actually, in political terms, anyway) country. We of course had set off without any papers at all, not a driving license or a passport between us. Doh! Rather than ride through the checkpoint, which seemed to be cool right now, and then get caught without papers on the way back, I thought it better to be proactive. I pulled up and wandered over to the shady hut by the barrier. When I opened my mouth to speak, the guard almost tripped over himself to run off and get the English speaking member of staff. Thus did we get to meet Pitaya, possibly one of the best speakers of English we’ve met so far in Thailand. He seemed totally cool about our lack of papers, just wanting to know when we were likely to return to the checkpoint. He offered us coffee and we sat and chatted a while. Seems the checkpoint there is simply to check up on migrant workers coming over from Burma. He explained the economics to us fairly easily. A labourer in Burma gets the equivalent of 40 Bhat per day. His counterpart in Thailand gets 170. Obviously, quadrupling your earnings makes it worth the risk to cross the border and work illegally. Sad to think though that these guys have to uproot and leave their families behind for a daily wage of £2.40.

He also filled us in on a few other facts on Myanmar. We hear so little about the place with the doors closed to the press entirely. Not only are wages much lower, but the officials claim half of anything produced. As many people in poor countries, folk tend to supplement their earnings with a small kitchen garden and raise a few chickens for their own consumption. He claimed that even these meagre provisions would be acquired by the authorities. It was unclear what happened to this produce, did it get redistributed to yet needier families? Or simply feeding the militia? Any way the outcome is that people are generally becoming discouraged from trying to better their lot in Myanmar and are looking to Thailand for better pastures. He was saying that the cost of getting a passport (80,000 baht, over £1,000), which obviously prohibitively expensive leaving the Burmese no real choice but to arrive illegally in Thailand. He seemed to have a lot of sympathy for his neighbours and knew that he has only ever finding a small fraction of those making the journey. I couldn’t be sure how many of the facts and figures he was giving us were gospel - it is pretty common for folk to have a poor opinion of their neighbouring country, after all. The caring tone in which it was delivered was unusual though. Here was a man working in imigration whose job it was to stem the flow of migrants from Burma meanwhile having great sympathy for them.

We waved our cheerios and headed on to Hellfire Pass, one of the notoriously grim sections of the railway construction. It had been called Hellfire Pass because digging out the cuttings involved workers labouring throughout the night, so during its construction fires were along the stretch of the valley to light the work. It was one of many passes and viaducts to cross the craggy mountains bordering Thailand and Burma. In the section where the worse fatalities occured the terrain was so difficult that hours were increased to meet the deadlines. Every sleeper on this section of the railway line represents a man’s life. The memorial, built by our Ozzy mates, was pretty even handed but did on a couple of occasions mention seemingly quite deliberately, “the asian workers and the POW’s” which brought their plight rather more directly into public awareness. We had intended to take the walk up the rail-bed that has been exposed and preserved but it commenced to pee it down and like a pair of ‘nanas we had nowt suitable to wear. Just as when we visited Auschwitz in the dead of winter and felt that this made us appreciate more what conditions were like there, here we were privileged to feel the heat and monsoon rain. Grim.

But without rain we would not have seen lovely waterfalls. Sai Yok Noi, Saiyok Noi or Sayoknoi or any other variation homophonic is a hugely popular weekend trip from Bangkok and all points in between. This is just about as perfect a picnic spot for a young family as you can imagine. The falls are around 20 metres high and cascade down onto a smooth area of rock sloping at about 30 degrees - prefect natural watersliding environment. This is obviously an old favourite and there were huge hordes of Thai weekenders out and about, their numbers swelled by vendors of all kinds of snacks and full meals. It’s hard to find a stretch of highway or footpath in Thailand that doesn’t have someone grilling, baking, frying of boiling something that smells delicious. We rather regretted not having brought our cossies with us but settled for a few snaps and snacks. These are not the famous Ewaran falls in the area, which apparently is bigger and better. But to me this was made more delightful, because there were just so many people out and about having a good time.

Just by chance (as you do) we met another Round the World biker by the name of Maarten. Dutch guy who had know decided to settle in Thailand with his Thai wife, after realising that Bolivia was more expensive and the quality of products less reliable. He was looking to buy a little land in the area, in his wife’s name. In Thailand it is illegal for a foreigner to buy land. Although theoretically possible to gain citizenship of the country, apparently although many apply no no-one ever gets it.


We had a day doing nothing very much apart from typing, and decided to stay another day a take in a set of ruins near by. These were Khmer ruins, I had had no idea that the Cambodian Empire had once extended across the width of Thailand. Such is the depth of my ignorance of Asian history. The ruins being the outposts of the empire, are I am sure, not as flash as many, but it also had the distinct advantage that although Kanchanaburi was heaving with tourists, we had the ruins to ourselves.

I am struck by the coincidences around the world, whilst the Incas were doing their thing in South America, Great Zimbabwe in Africa was being built, the Europeans were running around in castles and the Khmer were reigning over a large chunk of SE Asia. Was there something in the air? Why did we all it seems simultaneously feel the need to built great stone edificies? And then almost as simultaneously stop a couple of hundred years later?

Anyway enough of my ramblings, back to Meung Sing the ruin of the day. Laterite was the building stone of choice and I was amazed at the precision of the masonary considering the bobbly nature of the stone. How on earth did they manage to get such crisp edges with such uncooperative material. The Buddhist images here were quite different to the modern day ones we had seen so far. These fellas were seriously chunky squat little guys, not the elegant lithe depictions we had come to expect. To the modern eye they were verging on the gargole with disproportionately large lips and feet. No doubt the slimmer versions of today would have looked equally unappealing to the Khmer people of yesteryear.

A little poorly signposted and uninspiring museum on the way back to Kanchanaburi provided to us that the area had been inhabited way before the Khymer had arrived; prehistoric remains of settlements fairly litter the banks of the Kwai. In fact it was a POW’s sctatchings that led him to accidently stumble upon a number of these original settlements. After the war he studied archaeology and returned with an archeological team to excavate the sites.

As usual, there are characters in the hostel

We usually like to make mention of our fellow travellers and back at the floating hotel there was a man worthy of note. Shlomo (forgive the spelling) was a secretive man from Israel in his late 60’s. He passed his time playing patience and was hard to draw into conversation. He was here to get away from work and home and wanted to completely switch off .... until he had something of great importance to tell us, whereupon one could not get a word in edgeways. My favourite monologue of his was on the topic of nutrition.
“Fish is the best food for the brain”
“Yeah, I heard that. Isn’t it something to do with the potassium or some other minerals in the meat?”
“You must eat the brain of the fish. This is where the memories are. You know that if a fish is on the hook but manages to escape, it will never let itself be caught on a hook again.”
“Interesting”
Apparently if one is suffering from a sore throat one should eat chicken soup because the chicken has a marvelous voice “cock-a doodle-doo”.
If you have a bad leg (no specific ailment identified) you should eat leg of mutton. This man could save medical research millions.

He spoke 9 languages. No, really, he did. I am sufficiently versed in Arabic, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and English to spot a bullshitter and his claims about Hebrew and a couple of other middle eastern languages could not be contested. No, he’d certainly been about a bit; he carefully avoided answering where he was from before he landed in Israel but his natural language seemed to be French when he was playing cards. It was rather sad that a man who could speak so many Arabic languages could not accept that we had met so many decent Islamic people. He had them all down as murdering bastards and refused to concede my point that it was only the extremist politicians and religious leaders that queered the pitch. OK so the guy was on holiday and I should have allowed him to have his peace and quiet but really, I didn’t start it. He’d asked me where we’d travelled so far and then vented his spleen when I told him where we’d been in the middle east.

It was all rather sad. Here we were at the site of a terrible example of man’s inhumanity to man and it became clear to me that there will never be a peaceful solution to the arab/israeli conflict. I have yet to meet a single Israeli with an element of liberalism in his personality. Just a single one who could express thanks to his neighbours in the midle east who had land taken off them to create a homeland for a race would restore my faith in human nature. Don’t get me wrong. I know plenty of Jewish folk who are totally cool and, conversely, I’m completely aware the the Koran explicitly states that, “you should fight the Jew”, so this isn’t a one-sided harangue. Just lighten up, guys.