Moving On

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So we finally wrenched ourselves away from our island paradise. Having said goodbye to our new friends the afternoon before, we spent the morning of departure cheering ourselves up with some new t-shirt purchases. It’s not that we didn’t want to move on to new experiences, adventures ands memories - it’s just that everything about our time on Koh Tao was so perfect, and we had just learnt this new skill that opened up a whole new world to us, and for the time being at least, it was over.
For the seventh day in a row, we boarded a boat. But this time there would be no buddy checks, no mask and fins and no giant steps into the deep blue. Mercifully for me, there would also be no sea sickness either as the weather had chosen today to clear.
Three hours later we would be in Chumpon with six hours to kill before our overnight train back to the capital.
I slept the whole way and awoke to the sounds of the suburbs of Bangkok as we clattered past. Our time in Bangkok was brief - just long enough to drop our passports at the Vietnamese embassy before heading to the train station to begin the next leg of the journey.
We found our way to the Southern Train Station (which is in the north of the city) and bought our tickets for the three hour rude to Kanhanaburi.
As the city eventually gave way to forest and fields I had time to think about our next destination a little. Kanchanaburi is a nondescript town that would have been unlikely to have made it onto most travellers itineraries had it not been for a film. It is the site of the infamous bridge on the river Kwai, and where 16000 allied POWs and an estimated 80000 burmese, tamil and malay ‘workers’ lost their lives during the construction of the ‘death railway’. Our visit to Kanchanaburi is the first in a number of sites of ‘dark tourism’ on our itinerary that will also take in Cambodia’s killing fields, a number of locations in Vietnam and the sites of the Rwandan genocide, and I was curious to see how I would react.
Simply reading books about first hand experiences about Cambodia under the KR and the slaughter of Rwanda’s Tutsis has had me in floods of tears in recent months. Both those atrocities are seared into my living memory. But the WW2 is a little more remote, one generation removed, something we studied in History.
I got my answer the following day as we toured the new excellently concieved Railway museum. Squatting down to view the contents of one of the glass display cabinets, I was confronted with a collection of rusting personal effects, cigarettes tins with ‘mother’ or the name of a sweetheart painstakingly engraved into them, razor blades, cufflinks and numerous little horsehoes - gifted to their owners to bring them luck that in the end ran out.
The museum was put together by an Australian historian, who began retracing the original route of the railway just 10 years ago, finding many of the objects it now houses along the way. Little snapshots of lives lost or altered forever have been collected or donated by relatives - journals, pictures, letters from home all adding a personal dimension to the tragedy.
Dotted around the museum are exhibits funded by the relatives of the servicemen lost just a couple of kilometres up the road. Reading the dedications - father, husband, son - brings it home, that for many this is not a distant tragedy. For those left behind, it’s as real and as raw as any of the more recent horrors to befall this continent.
If I hadn’t already been in tears by the time we left, reading the guestbook at the exit would surely have finished me off. Amongst the pages of erstwhile comments from tourists from around the world was one entry, written clearly and neatly. Alongside a name and address, it simply said “I miss you dad.” I guess for many, those events and their consequences aren’t remote at all.
Across the road from the museum are the allied cemetries, housed in a shady park. Row after row of individual headstones mark the final resting place of thousands of British, Dutch and Australian soldiers. All but a few of the 16 000 individuals who died of disease, malnutrition, exhaustion or brutality were located, identified and moved from the numerous gravesites along the route of the railway to this final resting place, which is carefully tended and maintained by its Thai guardians.
I will recall this diligence and the huge defence budgets that made it possible, a few weeks later, as we looked across the lake in Cambodia’s Killing Fields. Not one body there was identified, not one victim has a grave or memorial for families to visit. Several thousand men women and children remain unexhumed, hidden from view by the waters of murky waters of the lake.

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