June
23, Saturday
World War II Memorial Cemetary in Kanchanaburi
Beautifully maintained, with many graves of unknown soldiers
I love the poppies on the altar.
Kanchanaburi War Cemetery contains the remains of 6,982 Australian, Dutch and British war prisoners who lost their lives during the construction of the Death Railway. Another 1,740 are laid to rest at the Chungkai Cemetery 2 km south of town on the bank of the Kwai Noi River and occupies the former Conk-Kai Prisoner of War ( 1,379 British, 313 Netherlands, 42 Malayan and 6 Indian). It was the site of a base camp, a hospital and a church built by the prisoners themselves. The great majority of 1,740 casualties buried in this war cemetery, which is the original burial ground started by the prisoners, are men who died in the hospital nearby. {Numbers vary depending on the source of the material I found.}
There is also a memorial to those soldiers who were taken prisoners and died in death camps while being used as slave labour to build the railway between Bangkok and Burma.
We then visit the privately owned World War II Museum which is very close to the famous River Kwai Bridge. It is definitely not the best museum I've been in, but since it is privately owned, many of the "recreated sites" have a definite non-professional look to them. Still, very informative.
My first view of the Bridge over the River Kwai, from the museum
The town has grown around it
Kanchanaburi, in Myanmar border, is home to the famous Bridge River Kwai. During WW II, Japan constructed the meter-gauge railway line from Ban Pong, Thailand to Thanbyuzayat, Burma. The line passing through the scenic Three Pagodas Pass runs for 250 miles. This is now known as the Death Railway. The railway line was meant to transport cargo daily to India, to back up their planned attack on India. The construction was done using POWs and Asian slave laborers in unfavorable conditions. The work started in October 1942 was completed in a year. Due to the difficult terrain, thousands of laborers lost their lives. It is believed that one life was lost for each sleeper laid in the track. Allied Forces bombed the iron bridge in 1944. Three sections of Bridge River Kwai were destroyed. The present bridge has two of its central spans rebuilt. The original parts of the bridge are now displayed in the War Museum.
I get to walk on the reconstructed bridge.
There is a huge temple complex on the other side of the river
My ride on the train
Views of the River were beautiful
Wonder if these are the ones we will be staying in?
Unfortunately we are given no time to take more pictures
of the wooden railway bridges and are whisked away by mini-bus to the Kitti
Rafts Restaurant where we will be having all our meals during this 3-day
excursion. There are many other tour
groups here, but the food is quickly served and is quite palatable, though
nothing to write home about.
The railway was never built to a level of lasting permanence and was frequently bombed by the Royal Air Force during the Burma Campaign. After the war, all but the present section was closed and the line is now only in service between Bangkok and Nam Tok Sai Yok Noi. The cutting known as Hellfire Pass is the longest and one of the deepest along the entire length of the railway. It was also notorious as one of the worst places of suffering on the Burma-Thailand railway. The cutting was planned by Japanese engineers and was to be cut using manual labour. The cutting here was known by several names, originally Konyu Cutting and then later variously “Hammer and Tap” because of the constant sound made by the crews drilling holes for explosives and the now better known Hellfire Pass, so named after the prisoners of war were kept working long into the night by the lights of fires and torches”. “More than 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and approximately 200,000 Asian labourers (romusha) worked to build the railway. Approximately 12,800 priosoners of war and about 90,000 romusha died from diseases, starvation, accidents, beatings and other causes during the 15 months of construction. They suffered from the brutality of their captors and Japanese indifference to their plight.”
After coming down a long wooden staircase, we arrive at the trail leading to Hellfire Pass
Some of the track treads are still visible along the well maintained trail
They've even replaced a small section as we enter Hellfire Pass
We get to walk down to the actual pass. I’ve made the acquaintance of a few people already (nice young couple from Colombia who are living in Australia while she works on her Master’s degree, Carole a young lady from France, and a few other couples who are travelling through Thailand).
I’ve seen the Hell-Fire-Pass on TV (an ex prisoner who worked on the railway through this pass recounts his story) who gave a moving account of his time here; but seeing it in person is quite disturbing. With a bit of imagination you can hear the sound of shovels and picks as they carve out this incredible pass through solid rock.
At the other end of the pass are memorial plaques
It is quite impressive
Carole and I opt to return to the museum through a different route through the forest, shown on the map. We end up climbing over 300 steps
The view down onto Hellfire Pass, from "the path less travelled"
It is incredibly long when you think of having to dig it all out by hand
Our path back to the museum
Lots of cooked, and uncooked meats.
Vegetables I recognize.... and some I don't
The regular type of Lychee
Some rafts float by as we eat dinner
There is a hanging bridge nearby
A family sit by the river as the sun starts to set
Half of us get onboard a river boat and the other half get on a truck and we all head out to the river raft hotel where we will be staying.
And we are off in our boat, going up-river
Should be a nice ride
We pass yet another suspended bridge
and other floating cottages
We see some beautiful ones along the river, and the ride up the river is exhilarating. Unfortunately, our raft hotel is not so impressive.I get one of the 2 rooms that are on the second level. Very spartan, but clean.
My room at the raft cottages
After I shower I decide not to go back outside where the flies are biting, and settle in my rock-hard bed, I kid you not, to read before going to sleep. Surprisingly, there is an air conditioning unit in the room and it works, although there is no control for the temperature or the fan speed. I wake up freezing during the night and turn it off. I’m sore from the hard bed but still manage to go back to sleep.
Early morning today at 6 am so that I check out of the
Viengtai Hotel and take off on my 3-day excursion to the river Kwai. We are 9 people in the minivan for our 2 hour
drive to Kanchanaburi. Our driver is
constantly sniffling and it is driving me crazy. Most people decide to doze during the drive,
but I keep an eye out on the scenery we are passing. For more than 1 hour we drive within city
streets and highways. The country side
is fairly flat with rich agricultural fields:
rice, corn and other plants I can’t distinguish because we are driving
by too quickly. I also see orchards of
dragon fruit with their thorny branches.
Our first stop after the 2 ½ hour drive is to the World
War II memorial cemetery, filled with the graves of soldiers from Britain,
Holland and Australia, who died trying to protect the people of Thailand from
the Japanese invaders. 
World War II Memorial Cemetary in Kanchanaburi
Beautifully maintained, with many graves of unknown soldiers
Kanchanaburi War Cemetery contains the remains of 6,982 Australian, Dutch and British war prisoners who lost their lives during the construction of the Death Railway. Another 1,740 are laid to rest at the Chungkai Cemetery 2 km south of town on the bank of the Kwai Noi River and occupies the former Conk-Kai Prisoner of War ( 1,379 British, 313 Netherlands, 42 Malayan and 6 Indian). It was the site of a base camp, a hospital and a church built by the prisoners themselves. The great majority of 1,740 casualties buried in this war cemetery, which is the original burial ground started by the prisoners, are men who died in the hospital nearby. {Numbers vary depending on the source of the material I found.}
There is also a memorial to those soldiers who were taken prisoners and died in death camps while being used as slave labour to build the railway between Bangkok and Burma.
We then visit the privately owned World War II Museum which is very close to the famous River Kwai Bridge. It is definitely not the best museum I've been in, but since it is privately owned, many of the "recreated sites" have a definite non-professional look to them. Still, very informative.
The photos of the PoWs in the museum portion bring me to tears. I further discover that many Asians were also used to break through the terrain and build the railway. No memorial cemetery for them that I know of.
My first view of the Bridge over the River Kwai, from the museum
The town has grown around it
Kanchanaburi, in Myanmar border, is home to the famous Bridge River Kwai. During WW II, Japan constructed the meter-gauge railway line from Ban Pong, Thailand to Thanbyuzayat, Burma. The line passing through the scenic Three Pagodas Pass runs for 250 miles. This is now known as the Death Railway. The railway line was meant to transport cargo daily to India, to back up their planned attack on India. The construction was done using POWs and Asian slave laborers in unfavorable conditions. The work started in October 1942 was completed in a year. Due to the difficult terrain, thousands of laborers lost their lives. It is believed that one life was lost for each sleeper laid in the track. Allied Forces bombed the iron bridge in 1944. Three sections of Bridge River Kwai were destroyed. The present bridge has two of its central spans rebuilt. The original parts of the bridge are now displayed in the War Museum.
I get to walk on the reconstructed bridge.
There is a huge temple complex on the other side of the river
We then walk to the train station for a 1 hour ride on
the Death Railway that leads to Burma.
On the train, crossing on the River Kwai Bridge
Views of the River were beautiful
In
1943 thousands of Allied Prisoners of War (PoW) and Asian labourers worked on
the Death Railway under the imperial Japanese army
in order to construct part of the 415 km long Burma-Thailand railway. This
railway was intended to move men and supplies to the Burmese front where the
Japanese were fighting the British. Japanese army engineers selected the route
which traversed deep valleys and hills. All the heavy work was done manually
either by hand or by elephant as earth moving equipment was not available. The
railway line originally ran within 50 meters of the Three Pagodas
Pass
which marks nowadays the border to Burma. However after the war the entire
railway was removed and sold as it was deemed unsafe and politically
undesirable. The prisoners lived in squalor with a near starvation diet. They
were subjected to captor brutality and thus thousands perished. The men worked
from dawn until after dark and often had to trudge many kilometres through the
jungle to return to base camp where Allied doctors tended the injured and
diseased by many died. After the war the dead were collectively reburied in the
War Cemeteries and will remain forever witness to a brutal and tragic ordeal.
We get off the train just at the wooden bridges which
still exist (kind of scary actually) and get to see the floating raft hotels on
the River Kwai. 
After lunch, we get back on the mini-bus and are driven to
the Hell-Fire-Pass Memorial Museum
Hellfire
Pass in the Tenasserim Hills was a particularly difficult section of the line to
build. It was the largest rock cutting on the railway, coupled with its general
remoteness and the lack of proper construction tools during building. A tunnel
would have been possible to build instead of a cutting, but this could only be
constructed at the two ends at any one time, whereas the cutting could be
constructed at all points simultaneously despite the excess effort required by
the POWs. The Australian, British, Dutch and other allied Prisoners of War were
required by the Japanese to work 18 hours a day to complete the cutting. Sixty
nine men were beaten to death by Japanese guards in the six weeks it took to
build the cutting, and many more died from cholera, dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion. However,
the majority of deaths occurred amongst labourers whom the Japanese enticed to
come to help build the line with promises of good jobs. These labourers, mostly
Malayans (Chinese, Malays and Tamils from Malaya), suffered mostly the same as
the POWs at the hands of the Japanese. The Japanese kept no records of these
deaths.The railway was never built to a level of lasting permanence and was frequently bombed by the Royal Air Force during the Burma Campaign. After the war, all but the present section was closed and the line is now only in service between Bangkok and Nam Tok Sai Yok Noi. The cutting known as Hellfire Pass is the longest and one of the deepest along the entire length of the railway. It was also notorious as one of the worst places of suffering on the Burma-Thailand railway. The cutting was planned by Japanese engineers and was to be cut using manual labour. The cutting here was known by several names, originally Konyu Cutting and then later variously “Hammer and Tap” because of the constant sound made by the crews drilling holes for explosives and the now better known Hellfire Pass, so named after the prisoners of war were kept working long into the night by the lights of fires and torches”. “More than 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and approximately 200,000 Asian labourers (romusha) worked to build the railway. Approximately 12,800 priosoners of war and about 90,000 romusha died from diseases, starvation, accidents, beatings and other causes during the 15 months of construction. They suffered from the brutality of their captors and Japanese indifference to their plight.”
After coming down a long wooden staircase, we arrive at the trail leading to Hellfire Pass
Some of the track treads are still visible along the well maintained trail
They've even replaced a small section as we enter Hellfire Pass
We get to walk down to the actual pass. I’ve made the acquaintance of a few people already (nice young couple from Colombia who are living in Australia while she works on her Master’s degree, Carole a young lady from France, and a few other couples who are travelling through Thailand).
I’ve seen the Hell-Fire-Pass on TV (an ex prisoner who worked on the railway through this pass recounts his story) who gave a moving account of his time here; but seeing it in person is quite disturbing. With a bit of imagination you can hear the sound of shovels and picks as they carve out this incredible pass through solid rock.
At the other end of the pass are memorial plaques
It is quite impressive
Carole and I opt to return to the museum through a different route through the forest, shown on the map. We end up climbing over 300 steps
The view down onto Hellfire Pass, from "the path less travelled"
It is incredibly long when you think of having to dig it all out by hand
Our path back to the museum
(I did not count how many we went down) and finally make it back to the museum ahead of the rest of our group, soaked with sweat.
On our way back to the Kitt Raft Restaurant, we make a quick stop at their local market.
Vegetables I recognize.... and some I don't
No idea what this is, nor am I interested in trying it.
and the hairy variety
We return to the restaurant for dinner and meet a
different group of travellers.
and a home just a little further up
Some rafts float by as we eat dinner
There is a hanging bridge nearby
A family sit by the river as the sun starts to set
Half of us get onboard a river boat and the other half get on a truck and we all head out to the river raft hotel where we will be staying.
Should be a nice ride
We pass yet another suspended bridge
and other floating cottages
We see some beautiful ones along the river, and the ride up the river is exhilarating. Unfortunately, our raft hotel is not so impressive.I get one of the 2 rooms that are on the second level. Very spartan, but clean.
My room at the raft cottages
After I shower I decide not to go back outside where the flies are biting, and settle in my rock-hard bed, I kid you not, to read before going to sleep. Surprisingly, there is an air conditioning unit in the room and it works, although there is no control for the temperature or the fan speed. I wake up freezing during the night and turn it off. I’m sore from the hard bed but still manage to go back to sleep.
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