You'll Start Whistling it Too

Marilee had another day off on Wednesday and we had an adventure planned, but Tuesday she had to go to work, so I looked in my travel books for day trips I could take. I chose Kanchanaburi, site of the Bridge Over the River Kwai. I knew that the bridge was somewhere in Asia, but I don’t know much WWII Pacific Theatre history (that is, I didn’t – I learned a lot that day, and I learned some in Hawaii, and I have been reading up about the Philippines). The Thailand-Burma “Death Railway” was quite strategic, shortening supply routes, and it was largely built by POWs. An estimated 16,000 POWs (out of 60,000) and 100,000 Asian laborers (out of 200,000) died while constructing the railway.

Whistling the theme song from the movie (which was whistled by the POWs, who developed but didn’t sing lyrics mocking the Japanese – and no, their lyrics were not “Comet, it makes your mouth turn green”), I took an air-conditioned van to the city and then a pedicab to the historic part of town. I went to a Chinese cemetery – it had nothing to do with WWII, but it was interesting, with wide grave markers, as opposed to the tall stupas of the Thai cemeteries.

It was right next to the Allied cemetery, where people from several countries are buried, with understated flat tombstones marking their graves. I then went to the Death Railway Museum, where I learned about the railway and the huge offensive that the Japanese launched on December 8, 1941 (across the international date line). In addition to Pearl Harbor, they attacked many different parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific on that one day.



I then walked over to the bridge itself – or rather, the current bridge, since it was severely damaged by Allied war bombing and rebuilt after the war. I walked across the bridge and saw my first Asian elephant (not a wild one, but he didn’t seem to be for hire, either).




On impulse, I took a boat ride along the river, stopping at another little museum that replicated POW camp conditions and at a cave that housed a Buddhist temple.



There was low clearance at a couple of points in the cave, and at one of them I hit my head and started bleeding profusely. Thankfully, there were a couple of other people in the cave; they had tissues and helped me clean off the blood that was running down my face, but I did wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t been there and I had hit myself hard enough to be knocked out. When would someone have found me? At what point would the boat driver have started to wonder? When I travel by myself I try to converse with people and to be noticed without being conspicuous – maybe someone will remember having seen me if there’s a problem. Lacking a mirror, I took a picture of my face and looked at the digital camera to make sure there wasn’t any noticeable blood, and then went back to my relaxing river ride.


I had borrowed a Thai phrase book from Marilee and used some phrases to order lunch and transact my van ride back, but I found that I kept talking in Arabic first and then had to re-focus to Thai – not easy, but I managed.

I had to get back, but there’s enough to do in the area to warrant an overnight or longer stay. Kanchanaburi has a lot of floating clubs and karaoke bars if that's your thing; apparently weekends get very noisy. In winter months, there’s a sound and light show by the bridge. One can take a train along the railway route to Hellfire Pass, the most brutal of the cuttings that were hewn by the POWs. There’s a national park with a seven-tiered waterfall nearby, a tiger adoption center (hard to pass that up!) and the Three Pagodas Pass, where you can look over the border to Burma (interestingly, all of the travel books I looked at call it Burma and not Myanmar).