Kanchanaburi – on the River Kwai

This is the River Kwai, in Kanchanaburi, western Thailand. We arrive here after another overnight train to Bangkok from Chiang Mai, a taxi across town to the Thonburi trains station, and a few more hours by rail.

Kanchanaburi
Kwai River

Below is the bridge on the river Kwai, as it appears today. In fact, it’s not a teakwood behemoth as built  by Alec Guinness in the eponymous movie. (Mention of which elicits blank stares and a background sound of crickets chirping when speaking to anyone under oh, say, age 45).

It’s a smallish steel bridge, destroyed several times during the war, the last and final time in 1945 by a 24-year-old Canadian pilot.

Kanchanaburi

The movie plot is entirely fictional, but Kanchanburi was near kilometre zero on the Thai side for the Burmese Railway, a Japanese project to facilitate the invasion of Burma and beyond into southern China. Built by slave labour, 100,000 people (80% of which were fellow Asians) died during its construction from disease, starvation , beating, and neglect as Japan pursued its insane butchery of tens of millions of souls Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

A better movie about goings-on in the area at that time is the Railway Man, with Colin Firth, which is based on a true story.

The zone around the bridge today is a zoo. Acre upon acre of market stalls selling crap, food stalls, parking lots. When I was here decades ago, none of this existed. That’s progress.

Just kidding, it’s a shameful freak show. Thank God the Commonwealth War Graves in the middle of town are as immaculately kept as all the other CWGs in the world. 7,000 men are interred here, mostly transferred from graves along the track.

Kanchanaburi
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Besides the bridge and its lore, Kanchanaburi is a pleasant riverside town.

We have a wonderful lunch by the river at the Blue Rice Café.

Kanchanaburi
Tom Kha Hua Pee Gai soup (with real pee, I presume), Ma La Kor Phad Thai Gai, and blue rice with edible pea flowers

On a blue theme, we stay at the Blue Star guest house, also by the river.

Welcome to Hobbiton-on-Kwai

Among other attractions, we have alligator-sized monitor lizards on our property. You can’t see the scale in the photo – no pun intended – but this bad boy is about 5 feet long. The green stuff is some kind of pond growth..

Kanchanaburi
Keep Calm and Slither On

You can see someone else’s giant Kanchanaburi lizard video here.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Kanchanaburi

Well, not quite Kanchanaburi. I forgot to mention when we touched down at Don Muang Airport in Bangkok, flying from Phnom Penh: it has a golf course in-between the runways. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Is that a birdie, an eagle, or an Airbus A310?