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The River Kwai
Entry 4 of 47 | show all | print this entry |
Today we are off to the river Kwai Bridge made so famous by the film of the same name. There are plenty of well-advertised tourist trips available and are fairly reasonably priced in tourist terms (about $25 U.S.) for a whole day out. However, on Saturdays there is a special priced train ticket for a trip to the bridge and up the gorge beyond the bridge. This tariff is usually sold to the local Thai people and tourists don't get a look-in as it is so cheap (about £1.20). Get the local bus to the station and find our train, which departs on time shortly before 7am. We pass through the suburbs and through the shantytowns tacked onto them for miles and miles. It is amazing how resourceful these people can be when given some corrugated iron, a few bits of wood, lots of cardboard boxes and a few rugs.
What appears to be rubbish dumps turns out to be thriving communities - the people of which are the workers who go each day into the city to work or eke a living by any which way they can. In between these settlements no land is wasted and makeshift fields are filled with lush green crops of rice and other staple foods. Watching from the train is like seeing a scrolling documentary of everyday life and before we realize a whole hour has passed and we are at our first stop.
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Nakhon Pathon is the location for Phra Pathom Chedi, the oldest Buddhist monuments in Thailand. It is the temple of King Mongkut, it was built in the fourth Buddhist Century and it looks like a giant upturned ice-cream cone. A complete restoration was undertaken in 1853 and its full splendor is still evident today as it towers to 120 metres. As with many of Thailand's state buildings, no expense is spared and there is much gold and many intricate carvings and sculptures throughout. We have about half an hour to see this and then be back on the train for the onward journey so we only really just get a brief experience of this holy monument and its size.
At every station there are traders ready to sell their wares. Normally, fruit, vegetables, deep-fried fish balls and long sticks tasting of donuts. It is here that we learn about the delights of the Durian fruit. About the size of a watermelon and greeny yellow on the outside it is probably the most repulsive smelling fruit in the world (when fresh!). It may well taste quite nice but you must firstly bypass the smell of vomit it gives off. In many hotels in the Far East along with other house rules the exclusion of the Durian fruit from the building ranks quite highly and rightly so! It astounds me how popular this fruit is and why so many stalls make a good living out of it by selling it to the local people. I do not see any tourist trying it at any time.
The main thing that we notice about the locals during this train journey is that they all seem to be eating something all of the time. Shoveling away great piles of tropical fruit, sweets and fish balls. It is a good job no one is travel sick or there would be rather a mess to clear up. We are the only westerners in our carriage and although the people we are travelling with cannot speak our language nor we theirs, we are able to communicate basics with sign language and gestures. We are offered fruit and hospitality and we genuinely feel that we were being welcomed honestly and wholeheartedly. There are however, stories that are told of backpackers being offered cakes and the like, which are loaded with drugs with the intention of stealing their backpacks while they are unconscious. We feel though that the situation we are in here is different from those stories although I would recommend caution at all times.
We arrive at the bridge about an hour and a half later and take a walk out over it. Difficult to take in the relevance of where we are with so many tourists with their loud clothes, big guts and expensive camcorders going "gee whiz Hon, is this the place on the film". Why can't they just go back their air-conditioned coaches and get off home for a McDonalds and a dustbin sized Haagen Daaz.
That's the trouble with famous places that find their stories recreated on the big screen - tourists will always track them down. Can't blame the locals for coining it in though - I suppose their money is just as good as anyone else's, rather more plentiful and easier to extract.
Back on the train again, we have at last escaped from the loud shirt brigade. Their tour ends at the bridge, ours goes another one-and-a-half hours up the gorge, carved out by the western soldiers during the war. You can only get a small insight into what they had to endure, working from dawn till dusk in very hot and sweaty conditions, with insufficient food and water and suffering from many untreated jungle illnesses. No wonder why so many of them had died along the way. They had dug the gorge by hand and it was intended to give the Japanese easy and quick military access to Burma. The job would have been gruelling enough using JCB's and modern technology. One can only begin to comprehend what they had to go through.
Arrive at Nam Tok Waterfalls where lots of children are going around selling food and drink on palm matting trays. Lots of mangy dogs rummaging through the bins. Buy a spicy sausage from a stall (which I regret dearly later on!) which tastes O.K. but I had no idea of its origin and sit by the falls to cool off for a while. On the way back to Bangkok, we are given a 40-minute stop at Kanchanaburi to visit the graves of the European soldiers. Most of them were in their 20's when they died and there are thousands of graves here. To our amazement we find a Fayers and a Prendergast (two rare names of my family) in the same row. Make a mental note to investigate this later.
Pull into Bangkok Station at 8.40pm exhausted - it's been a long day. Go back to the Asia hotel, pick up our bags, manage to stuff it all, and ourselves, into a tuk-tuk and check in at the White Orchid Hotel after a confusing detour to another White Orchard Hotel. There is a lovely restaurant over the road with golden arches over the front door where I procure a wonderful beef sandwich called a Big Mac. (O.K. I know; what a hypocrite.) Anyway, it's the nearest place and probably a bit safer than the sausage, which, incidentally, has being playing havoc with my digestive system ever since I ate the damned thing.
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