Day 42 - Remeberence Day at Kanchanaburi

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Up early (again!) to get another scary minivan, this time to Kanchanaburi - a town a couple of hours north west of Bangkok and stradling the river Kwai. It is indeed the location of the film 'Bridge Over the River Kwai'.

Although I knew it wasn't going to be an easy day, it ended up being far tougher than I imagined. Being the 11th November, and arriving at 10.45, I headed straight to the Allied War Cemetery just in time for 11.00. I was knocked for six as soon as I walked in as the cemetery was so well cared for and far better respected than many of our own. There were around 7,000 marked graves in this cemetery and several monuments around the edge with inscriptions for lost lives and unfound remains. At the centre of the cemetery was a monument with a few poppy wreaths and I joined several westerners there for the minute of silence. I found myself in tears before I even reached the monument - something I wasn't expecting and that was not eased by walking round the gravestones afterwards. I have included photos of some of the many inscriptions that caught my eye and also of the care taken by the staff at the cemetery to keep it looking as beautiful as it does. An Aussie guy stepped over the flower bed between 2 stones to escape the jets of spray watering the lawns and was politely pulled aside and asked not to step over the graves but to walk around the grass paths as laid out.

Just ouside the gates was the Burma-Thai railway centre, which describes the building of a railway line between the 2 countries in the early 1940s but POWs and slaves held by their Japanese captors. I can't even begin to describe the horrors of the regmine and direct you to the their homepage for a briefy and 'light' overview - http://www.tbrconline.com/default.asp?PageID=4.

I haven't seen the film so I don't know if it is an acurate representation, but the musem was certainly heart wrenching. In one display, they have a sleeper from the railway representing each country that lost lives during the building of this railway. In each sleeper are a number of nails used to fix the track in place. Some sleepers can hardly be seen for the amount of nails, others have very few. At first, the sleepers are simply a display of artefacts from the war, and then you see the sign that says every nail represents the 500 men that died building this railway for the Japanese. There were 7 nails in the British sleeper. To put this in context the number of nails for each country is as follows:
Malaysia - 84 nails (75,000 slaves, 42,000 deaths)
Burma - 80 nails (90,000 slaves, 40,000 deaths)
Javanese/ Singaporean - 7 nails (12,700 slaves, 3,400 deaths)
Britain - 7 nails (30131 POWs, 6904 deaths)
Dutch - 5 nails (17990 POWs, 2782 deaths)
Australian - 6 nails (13004 POWS, 2802 deaths)
The list goes on.

Over 16,000 prisoners of war perished during the period between late 1942 and late 1945. The numbers of deaths of the Asian labourers is harder to calculate; around 100,000 seems to be the most reliable figure.

A pretty tough morning. I had some trouble finding a hotel as I hadn't prebooked, but eventually got sorted and headed off to the bridge itself. I joined many other tourists on a pilgramage across the bridge and back. Trains still run across the bridge and tourists are not cleared from its tracks, but expected to make it to one of the passing points before they arrive! I managed to get some photos as the train went past and was stuck by a rather bizarre realisation. There were several people on the bridge taking photos of the train going by and several people on the train taking photos of the bridge going by, so all that is happening is that several tourists are taking photos of each other, taking photos of each other. I have a photo to prove it! Unbelievable! An abstract end to a very sombre day!

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