So much for 'I will blog every day'. How is it that you can get so used to being in a beach that you get to the point that you no longer have anything interesting to write about? The last time I wrote a blog entry, I was in Ao Nang and was island hopping and loving it all. Since then, things have gone a slight bit downhill, to no fault of my own or Thailand's. I arrived after Ao Nang in Ko Tao on the other side of the peninsula, and found that after one day of tottering around and topping up the tan on the beautiful beach, that I had acquired a vomiting bug. Not Fun. The next few days were spent recovering, and therefore Ko Tao has gone by in a mildly strange blur. Now recovered and after a looooong 17 hour journey up the country, I find myself back on the mainland in Kanchanaburi about 2 hours outside Bangkok. Finally, I am back to doing what I do best; history. Kanchanaburi is full of it.
The area was made famous by the fifties movie 'The Bridge On The River Kwai' which tells the story of British POW's in a labour camp run by Japanese during the second world war, and they were working on building a bridge over the river so that the Japanese could transport goods and soldiers into Burma. The movie is of course, as with most movies of the time, highly innacurate, but the idea is pretty stable. Basically, POWs from Britain, America, the Netherlands and Australia worked here cutting through the jungle to build the railway line, and the horrendous conditions they were subjected to saw thousands die along with about 100,000 Thai natives. The town now has a very nice war cemetery to the 7000 western people who died, along with a really detailed and well presented museum across the road.
We also went to the War Museum beside the actual bridge, and found it to be .... how do I put this .... like a scene of a strange messed up dream where nothing makes sense. The 'museum' had aspects of nearly every war in Thailand, but decided to put them all into the same building, and talk about them in different places in the museum, and draw pictures on the roof to add to the 'explanation', and stick random prehistoric pots beside pictures of starving WWII soldiers and a statue of a Thai prince from the 1700s. They even have a picture of Hitler thrown into it all .... but the picture was of Stalin .... and the picture of 'Stalin' wasnt Stalin at all .... typical Thailand really. Considering that my school painted a map of the world into a massive wall in the school 10 years ago and named Russia as the USSR and said countries like the Ukraine and Lithuania didnt exist just shows how education and knowledge is done in most of the country. Kind of comical and kind of scary all at the same time.
The bridge itself is surprisingly small. There is always the idea in your head that when a massive and harrowing story surrounds something, that something must be big. But no. The bridge is a metal bridge, the same as any other. Of course it was important to see it as so many people died building it, but standing there looking at it and being surrounded by tourists from all around the world posing and smiling taking photos in front of it made me feel a little strange. It felt like someone may feel if you saw someone taking a smiling happy picture at the gates of Auschwitz. You think 'what a thing to smile at'. But that's tourism right. You go, take the smiling picture and go home and show your family what a great time you had in front of the big famous bridge.
The whole thing has left a strange taste in my mouth I have to say, and seeing the rows and rows of plaques with my own eyes has posed lots of questions in my head about the reasons for war, questions I never really thought about outside of my University essays. I suppose that's the point of these places though, to get you to think. If I wanted to stay away from reality, I would have just stayed on the beach.
After a trip to a waterfall tomorrow, its back to where it all began; Bangkok.
Sawatdiikha.
ps. Sorry for the lack of images. The computer has clapped out so no way putting my photos on it. Currently robbing time on my friend's laptop to update the blog. Will hopefully be fixed in Bangkok at the weekend.
0 comments:
Post a Comment