Lost for words

We spent our first morning in Kanchanaburi visiting the Death Railway Museum and the main allied cemetery.

It is hard to describe the effect of the story which these two sites tell when taken together. Despite my previous research, the exemplary way in which the museum told the story and 7000 war graves in a small city block, I still cannot begin to understand the suffering that the allied POW's and the Asian conscripted labourers went through during the building of the railway.

Juxtaposed with the tv pictures of that grinning monkey - who was our Prime minister for far too long - trying again to justify his decision to start his own war in Iraq - it makes me wonder if we will ever learn anything about the futility of war!

Tomorrow we are heading up the railway to Hellfire Pass to pay our own respects - in some small way.

As a sideline it is interesting to note that the river over which the infamous Bridge was built was not the Kwai at all. Pierre Boulle who wrote the book which was turned into the movie had assumed that because the railway ran along side the KwaiNoi for much of its route, that this was the river that had been bridged at Kanchanaburi. In fact it was the Mae Khlong. Obligingly the Thai government renamed it Kwai Yai after the movie had been released and the first groups of tourists started arriving to visit the site.