River Kwai

We set off early the next morning to start our first tour. Becci and I had made a silly decision to share a bottle of whiskey that night, (I needed it to calm my nerves after the pingpong show), so we were up later than I had hoped the next morning.
We set off to Kanchanaburi province in a minibus, which was quite cool and had working air con, and soon arrived at the War graves.

It was a sobering visit, the perfect rows of headstones, marking the graves of those British and commonwealth soldiers who had died building the railway to Burma. I walked up and down the lines, the headstones glittering wet after the recent rain, and read the inscriptions. Many were my own age and younger, and I could only imagine how fucked up it must have been to have died so far from home, in such as strange foreign land, building a railway in conditions that were killing your friends around you. Not even fighting, but building a railway.

The Jeath museum by the bridge over the river Kwai and the Hellfire pass museum gave greater insight into the railway, the lives it cost, and the conditions for the prisoners during the end of their war. All in it was a very sober day- insightful, educational, and deeply saddening.



"We loved you with all our hearts, always. We will be united again one day in heaven- your Mum and Dad"

That was an inscription on one of the headstones. It really got to me, that one.