The Bridge on the River Mae Klong

As a little adjunct to yesterday's blog on the train, here is something I wrote on the first day of our rail journey, after we had visited the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai (actually incorrectly named, the bridge is on the river Mae Klong).  It didn't seem right to include the dreadful history of the Thai Burma railroad in all the jollyness of the previous blog, but it was also such a moving, place to visit that I didn't want to not write about it.  So here's how it felt...

It's been a sobering morning (Saturday).  The picture above is of the Bridge on the River Mae Klong - made famous by Alec Guinness and William Holden in the well-known film  Bridge on the River Kwai.  Different river, in reality.  Different just about everything else too.

This morning's visit to Kanchanaburi was the first stop on my E&O train journey from Bangkok to Singapore.  It was early when we reached the bridge; off the train at 8.30 am, thankfully before the tourist coaches arrive (and they surely do, there is a huge number of restaurants around the riverside).  For those whose knowledge of  Asian Second World War history is as scanty as mine was, the Thai-Burma railroad was built by POWs to enable Japan to get military supplies and forces into Burma without having to go round Singapore and the Malacca Straits, where their ships kept getting sunk.  Under truly hideous conditions, thousands of Brit and American POWs - and even more conscripted Malay, Burmese and Indians - were forced to build the railroad.  The conditions were unthinkable; tens of thousands died.

It's always odd visiting somewhere that has been a scene of real suffering, and yet gradually morphed into a tourist attraction.  I felt it most recently in Mostar, Bosnia, where the rebuilt streets teem with hordes of cruise trippers, browsing the tourist-tat stands that line the cobbled streets.  In Kanchanaburi, the silent bridge straddles the slow-flowing river, with just the odd boat drifting quietly along on the water.  A monument in itself, flanked by an ornate temple on the far side of the river, and a clutch of ramshackle tourist shops and the waterfront restaurants on the other.

At first it feels hard to comprehend the hardship that took place in these tranquil, beautiful surroundings.  A trip to the Death Railway Museum, clearly a life's work for its creator - made it easier to imagine; a careful, detailed analysis and explanation of life for those who built the railroad, and their captors.  It made me think, not for the first time, of the sheer unbreakable will that somehow motivates people to keep on going, even in the most unimaginable conditions. 

The visit ended with a visit to the war cemetery; neat lines of polished stones, each marking a life that ended thousands of miles from home in the blistering heat of the bewildering Thai jungle.  I read a few of the headstones, but I had to stop.  Too many lives lost, too many people hurt, bereaved and damaged.  Nothing more to say.