Kanchanaburi (or some such place)

So I've come to the last stop on my trip and man is it a doosy. During the Japanese occupation of Se Asia they found it very inconvenient to have to ship things by sea all the way around the tip of Singapore. They also had a surplus of captured Allied soldiers. What to do, what to do??? 'Oooh' they thought to themselves, 'We could violate the Geneva Convention (as well as many moral barriers) and put these guys to work!' The decision was made that a railway should be built connecting the rail systems of Thailand to those in Myanmar (Burma). The British had decided such a feat was impossible a decade earlier, but it is important to remember that they did not have a war time steel economy or population of indispensable workers to rely on. So at the cost of nearly 100,000 lives the Japanese managed to build their railway to Rangoon. IT SHOULD BE NOTED: While I am not trying to undervalue the sacrifices of the Western Allied soldiers who died here it should be noted that of the 100,000 lives lost almost 60,000 were Malay, Chinese, and Thai workers. That's a good bit more than half and there are shockingly few (as in none that I have seen) monuments to these people here in Kanchanaburi.

There are however a series of fabulous museums covering Japanese aggression in the region as well as life in the POW camps. My walking also included a somber visit to a POW cemetery (about the only quiet place I've been in Thailand since leaving the beaches). Of course, I also visited the famous bridge over river kwai. In reality it is just a bridge but even the most cynical would have to admit to being moved by the terrible costs it took to construct this bridge. I walked past a group of very old Brits (and am currently reading a book about a group of RAF comrades having a reunion) and I couldn't help but wonder how deeply and personally those men knew the cost of what it took to build the bridge.

My history lesson complete, tomorrow will probably just be about chillaxing all cool. We''ll see when it happens.
C. Johnson