For the last couple of days we’ve been in Kanchanaburi, the home of the bridge over the River Kwai. The town itself is a dump - it’s scruffy and smells and we don’t like it at all - but our hotel is nice so we’ve spent time chilling and reading. A couple of highlights have been:
- Visiting the Thailand-Burma railway museum: This tells the story of how the Japanese occupied the region and built a 415km railway, using prisoners of war. More than 100,000 men died during construction, leading it to be known as the ‘death railway’ - the story is told in the famous film ‘bridge over the river Kwai’. It was very moving and interesting, and especially poignant as outside the museum was a huge cemetery containing the graves of over 7,000 men who’d died here.
- We also visited the bridge itself and took 15 minute train trip over it.
- We visited Thailand’s famous Tiger Temple. It was great as we got to stroke lots of tigers, which we hadn’t expected.
We were both a bit dubious about whether the tigers were well looked after - but they did look very healthy and Buddhist monks are generally renowned for looking after animals, in case they themselves are re-incarnated as one.
We did have our suspicions that the tigers we ‘met’ were drugged, but apparently they were just tired after their lunch. I’ve since done some research on the internet and it seems the place is pretty well respected, so I can post the photos here without feeling guilty!
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