I do the rest of my lessons and then I’m home free. I’m so excited about leaving Bangkok and going off to do something. It feels like I got a taste of travelling then had to stop almost as soon as I’d started.
I call Mengly to see how long she’ll be and she immediately says, ‘Didn’t you get my message?’ Turns out she’s heading home even earlier than she thought – a grad school she’s applied to attend wants to interview her in LA and she needs to go back, which means she needs to work on her Thai music story and get some interviews done before she goes. It’s a shame but I’m quite pleased really – I really did want to do this trip on my own.
I see Jess having a fag outside the building and tell her what’s happened. She tells me she could tell I wanted to go alone. She seems to read me a lot better than Mengly, which is both nice and disconcerting at the same time! She introduces me to Jeff, a white-haired bloke who looks like he’s in his 50s. He works upstairs at another English school and Jess sees him outside all the time when they smoke. This, I reason to myself, is why it’s good to smoke – you get to meet interesting people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. I met half my mates at college because we were all outside smoking. Some of them have become lifelong friends. Thank God for fags! Jeff’s a nice bloke – tells me where to get a bus route map so I can attempt to conquer the bus routes of Bangkok and use the annoying taxi drivers less.
I walk down the road to the Southern Bus Terminal, which, handily, is just 10 minutes away from where I work. Still, walking with my backpack in the mid-afternoon heat is not a good idea, and when I finally arrive (the 10 minutes feel like hours) I’m dripping with sweat. At the bus terminal I can’t find the ticket window for Kanchanaburi – every other city or town in Bangkok seems catered for – and in typical male fashion I refuse to ask someone where to buy a ticket. It must be here somewhere. I eventually find it, buy a ticket (99 baht) and go hunting for where the bus might be. Can’t find it, have to go back and ask. Dammit!
While I’m waiting an oldish Thai woman asks me if I’m going to Kanchanaburi. I tell her yes. She tells me she lives there. I ask her if it’s nice. She says yes. Now I feel like I have to make the effort to converse with her when she started the bloody conversation. I don’t bother. I get the feeling this is her limit of English, and she seems to have lost interest in the conversation anyway. I go and buy some water.
There’s ten minutes before the bus is due to leave but I decide to get on it anyway. I rushed on by the female conductor as the driver prepares to pull out. Yes, that’s right folks – some Thai public transport leaving EARLY. Amazing. It’s more of a coach than a bus and is full of Thai people. I stick out like a sore thumb with my backpack and shorts and t-shirt and everyone stares at me as I get on. I gawp back at the two Thai soldiers on there – to me they’re the ones sticking out. They’re probably grateful I got on.
The journey is hot, uneventful. I listen to my iPod and watch Thailand go by outside. As soon as I get off the bus at Kanchanaburi I’m approached by a bloke asking where I’m going. Here we go, I think, and do my usual disarmer: ‘I don’t know.’ I sit down on a bench to look at my guide and work out where I actually want to stay tonight. I’ve got a few places in my mind but I need to make a decision.
The man follows me. He’s tall for a Thai, skinny, with a pony tail. He reminds me a bit of what Darius looked like when he was first on Pop Idol doing that Britney song. He sees my Lonely Planet guide and goes, “I know that book!” and gets out some leaflets for a couple of places that are mentioned in the book. I read about a couple; the Jolly Frog sounds all right, bit of a backpacker favourite. I ask him how much to take me there. He says 40 baht. All I’m thinking is, what’s the catch? I agree for him to take me. I’m expecting a tuk-tuk. I get a rickshaw, and a bloody uncomfortable one at that.
We travel through Kanchanaburi – a decidedly average town, with its wide roads and endless Thai shop awnings punctuated by the odd Coca Cola sign – and I’m on high alert for being ripped off by this fella. But he seems quite harmless. The man whistles a lot, and then starts singing at one point - he has a surprisingly good voice. He points out various things I might want to go and have a look at – a Chinese cemetery, which looks much more colourful than our own dour efforts, and a busy-looking market. Then he mentions a place that’s cheaper than Jolly Frog that he can take me too and I brace myself for the sales pitch. I tell him Jolly Frog is fine and he leaves it at that. I’m almost stunned.
We get to Jolly Frog and he refuses to take my money from me until I’ve checked whether there’s a room or not. I go and do so and there is. I pay him his 40 baht and off he goes. No attempt to rip me off, nothing. What a nice bloke. I hope that he gets some kind of commission from the guesthouses for bringing guests or something. There has to be more for him in it than 40 baht and a captive audience for his singing.
Jolly Frog is pretty cool. I walk through a relaxed-looking restaurant, past the inevitable travel agent desk and onto a lawn with palm trees and deck chairs. Around the lawn are the rooms, in two stories, and at the bottom of the lawn you look out onto the river Kwai. It’s beautiful – the other side of the river being mostly untouched by tourism.
After settling into my room – nice (it has a SPRING bed!!!OMG!11!!!) but no pressure in the shower – I grab a beer from the restaurant and sit and watch the sun go down. Well, sit and watch it disappear behind a big cloud anyway.
There’s some fat German tourists sat on the deckchairs on the lawn, but mostly it’s so quiet, it’s amazing. After the constant noise of Bangkok, the peacefulness of Kanchanaburi, and sitting here looking out over the river as the sun fades away, is a real pleasure. The only disturbance is the odd karaoke barge that sails up and down the river as its occupants sing really badly in Thai. This is very amusing. I go and get some food and as I start to eat they put on Superman Returns. I’ve seen it before but I figure it’s worth watching again. I enjoyed it the first time and the action set pieces are worth repeat viewing. But after that I head to bed, figuring I want to get up early and make the most of my day here.
Feb 26
I get up earlyish and walk the 10 minute walk to the Thailand-Burma Railway Centre. I figure it’s best to go here first so I know the story and have some background for when I visit both great uncle Ron’s grave and the bridge over the River Kwai.
I spend nearly three hours in the place. It’s a fascinating story and really well-presented in what is obviously quite a new museum. They’ve collected some impressive artifacts – like pans and items of clothing that the soldiers scratched or drew darkly humorous doodles on of what was happening to them. The story itself is well-documented; you don’t need me to go over it here. But to summarise briefly for those who aren’t aware of it: during the Second World War, when the Germans were stomping around Europe going, ‘Mine, mine, mine,’ like those seagulls in Finding Nemo, the Japanese were doing much the same in southeast Asia. Having occupied Thailand and Burma, they were trying to get their mitts on the south-western parts of China, but we’re finding it difficult to get supplies and weaponry there to combat the supplies and weaponry the Allied forces were giving the Chinese. The easiest route was by boat in the straits between Singapore and Indonesia, but the Allies would just pick them off there, so they decided to build a railway across the Thailand-Burma border.
But there was a reason why there wasn’t such a line in existence already – the mountainous terrain in that part of the world made it almost impossible for one to be built. But the Japs thought they’d have a go anyway and got their best engineers on the case. With designs in place and potential problems solved, they went ahead with it, using their prisoners of war as man power to build the bloody thing.
The PoWs were promised much nicer conditions than the ones they had been used to and so went along happily to help build this railway. What they found when they go there was a living hell. They worked all the hours of daylight there were, they slept on the most basic of beds with mosquitoes attacking from above and bed bugs attacking from below, they were given little food, and what was given was far from fresh, and as for medical supplies, there were very little. With men succumbing to the heat, exhaustion and many a tropical disease, the death toll is of no surprise. What is shocking is the inhumanity of the Japanese army officers, whose only concern was to get the railway built as quickly as possible.
The events surrounding the building of the railway were used in a novel by Pierre Boulle, which was then made into a film – 1957’s The Bridge over the River Kwai starring Alec Guiness, and so they gained more notoriety than many of the other horrors you could read about the Second World War. But although it’s a well-told story, it does nothing to lessen its impact, at least not for me.
Absorbing this and knowing that a relative of mine went through this experience – one that eventually killed him – makes it all the more heart-breaking somehow. Okay, I never met him and he’s not a blood relative (he married my paternal grandfather’s sister), but having that connection takes away the mind’s ability to go, okay that happened 70 years ago and is nothing to do with me. When we’re told about the more shocking parts of history we can usually distance ourselves from it because of the time elapsed. ‘So Henry VIII had two of his wives BEHEADED? Wow, that’s a crazy story. Let’s turn it into a nursery rhyme!’ And so on. But having this family connection makes the experiences of these soldiers all the more real for me, and it’s heart-breaking.
Ronald Toyer was married to my Dad’s Auntie Win, with whom he had a daughter, Pat, one of the few members of that branch of the family that my Dad is still in touch with. He joined the army in 1939 as the war was first kicking off and after his training was posted first in India and then Singapore. It was here he was captured by the Japanese army, after which he was eventually put to work on the Thailand-Burma Railway.
Inside the museum there is a staircase, the walls of which are adorned with the coats of arms of many of the world’s regiments whose soldiers worked on the railway. My great uncle Ron’s is there – the 148th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, of the Hertfordshire & Bedfordshire Yeomanry. You’re not supposed to take any photos inside the museum but I snatch one of this.
I then go downstairs to the reception and ask them to pull up his details. They have details – age, regiment, what they died of, where they died, etc - of every soldier that was discovered buried along the Thailand-Burma Railway and then re-buried in one of the two PoW cemeteries in Kanchanaburi. While the Thai receptionist goes and gets the details of my great uncle, I wander around the gift shop. Such merchandising – keyrings, notebooks, etc - seems a little inappropriate in connection with such a tragic part of history. I wonder if they’ll have similar items at a similar museum at the location of the World Trade Centre in New York in 50 years time.
The girl comes over and gives me an A4 sheet. It has his rank, name, nationality, unit, and the date of his death – 19th August, 1943. It tells me he died in Tha Sao Hospital and was first buried in Tha Sao No 2 (St. Luke’s) Cemetery, grave no. 131. It tells me he died of dysentery (if you don’t know what it is, you don’t want to), debility (loss of strength), and malnutrition.
He was 27.
His age is a bit of a shock to me. I figured he must have been young, but to see it in print makes quite an impact. I’m TWO YEARS older than him when he died. He had so much ahead of him - a wife and baby daughter back home, pretty much his whole adult life to look forward to. All taken away from him an entity more concerned with oppressing as many people as possible than helping them prosper in any way. It sickens me.
There are no flowers left in the gift shop for me to take to the cemetery (I assume they were all taken by the coachload of Dutch people that followed me into the museum; I see a lot of Dutch tourists during the day as there were thousands of Dutch PoWs who were put to work and died on the Railway as well) so I ask for directions to the nearest florist. I’m told there’s one about 10 minutes walk away so I head off. After the cool interior of the museum, walking outside is like stepping into an oven. I head down the street I was directed to, in search of the florist. It takes me ages to find it and when I do I’m almost dizzy with the heat. The florist lives up to cliché by being a very effeminate chubby Thai man with a limp wrist and everything. Brilliant. He can’t speak a word of English so we do a lot of pointing and, of course, I end up with a much bigger bunch of flowers than I anticipated – some nice white lilacs and some other flowers I couldn’t tell you the name of. But it’s only 150 baht, a bargain, and I figure great uncle Ron doesn’t get many flowers.
When I get back to the cemetery I head to a shop to buy a coke and recuperate. The shop-owner says I can sit down outside in the shade for a bit if I like. I must look a right state – a sweaty foreigner who can’t take the heat. I sit there and drink a can of Coke and stare at my flowers. I never buy flowers and I’m quite pleased with my unintentional selection.
When I’ve finished my Coke I feel better, and head to the cemetery across the road. Just looking over the low wall you can see it’s really well-kept. Walking through the marble entrance you feel the gravity and depth of thought that has gone into making and keeping this place a fitting memory of the tragic deaths it commemorates. On the wall is a heartfelt message saying that this land is a gift from the Thai people to those who died in their country.
The cemetery is huge, but I find great uncle Ron’s plot and grave quickly. I had directions from Dad and it’s also detailed clearly on the A4 sheet I was given at the museum. I put my flowers down and say, hello, nice place you got here. I feel the need to be a bit flippant as it feels silly being all serious when I didn’t know the fella. His gravestone gives his number and rank – 903805 Lance Bombardier Ronald Toyer – his regiment, and when he died – August 19th, 1939. But what touches me is the quotation underneath: “A beautiful memory will never fade, of one we loved dearly but could not save.” Other gravestones have similar tributes (some none at all), but none are quite as heartfelt as that. He must have been a well-loved bloke.
Back home life went on, of course. After the war my great aunt Win (who I met one afternoon when I was a young boy and she an old lady – I remember her as being very warm and welcoming) would go on to marry Ron’s brother Harold and have two more daughters – Janice and Shirley. I don’t know the story behind that one, but I figure it probably wasn’t that unusual back then, when communities were much smaller and more tight-knit.
I wander around the cemetery. There are few people around; those that are, like me, armed with flowers. A huge cross dominates the centre of the cemetery, while on the west side there is a memorial to those whose bodies were not found, and to the left of that a memorial to those who were cremated. I watch the Thai gardeners carefully tend to the plants that sit next to the gravestones. It’s quite admirable that the Thais still take so much care to keep the memory of what happened alive. Occasionally as I walk I see a gravestone with no name – an unlucky soldier who couldn’t be identified. The quotation at the bottom of each one simply says, ‘Known unto God.”
I start to walk out of the cemetery and wander what I’m going to do with myself now. Then I remember: the bridge over the river Kwai! Not sure how I could forget that. My guidebook says the quickest way to get there is on a sawngthaew which will take you on the 10 minute journey down the road. I wait by the main road but none come so I just jump on the first bus that comes along. A woman shouts at me, where am I going? I shout back, “Death Railway Bridge,” about three times (the bus is very loud). Again, I’m the only Westerner on there and I get stared at unashamedly. We drive past a sign that says ‘The Bridge Over The River Kwae’ and the bus doesn’t stop, so I press the buzzer. THE WHOLE BUS turns around and looks at me, which is quite disconcerting. I pay the woman my 10 baht and get off as quickly as possible.
I walk down a path that runs alongside the railway. The line itself seems tiny – not worth the effort and lives that were put into making it. I walk along the station platform, which is full of stalls selling tourist tat and food and drink. Again, it seems a little inappropriate, but who am I to argue with capitalism? The bridge itself is impressive. A vast metal structure that looks slightly foreboding and totally unbreakable (it took four or five attempts by the Allies to bomb the thing).
It’s still in use – I have to wait for a train to come over it before I can walk along it. What happens if you’re in the middle and a train comes along? Well, there are platforms on the side of the bridge which you can stand on out of harm’s way. Plus the trains go about 1 mile an hour over it so you could probably out-run one with ease!
There are Dutch tourists all over it, all middle-aged. They’re fucking rude. There’s a metal platform along the middle of the bridge with two thinner wooden platforms along each side. Walking down I had to give away to these fat ignorant fuckers each time and endure a little vertigo as I balanced precariously on the wooden planks next to a big ol’ drop down to the river below. The sensible thing would have been for each of us to put one foot on the wooden bit and the other on the metal bit, but oh no.
Apart from that it’s a beautiful place to be. You get an amazing view of the river on each platform, the sun is beating down and it’s very peaceful, despite all the tourists. I walk over the bridge and on the other side there is an unopened market. In an open area next to it stands an elephant, chained to the ground and not looking happy about it. It sways from side to side, looking a bit depressed. A Dutch woman goes near it, but not too near, to have her photo taken. I will the elephant to kick her. (Sometimes I worry about the bouts of misanthropy that flare up in me.) It doesn’t.
I go back over the bridge and grab some noodle soup to eat. It’s my favourite dish, I’ve decided, mostly cos it’s probably the healthiest thing you can eat here and it tastes damn good. I’m not really hungry – the heat does funny things to my appetite – but it’s something to do.
When I’m done I head down the road a bit to the WWII Art Gallery & War Museum. I’m a bit museumed out but my guidebook describes it as ‘quirky’, ‘garish’, and a ‘monument to kitsch’, which sounds entertaining. It is, to say the least, bizarre. It looks like it was designed by Liberace, but built by men who had more of a multi-storey car park in mind.
The exhibits, meanwhile, look like they were out in there by removal men who were just told to put stuff wherever they could. There’s a loose war theme to it all – but things like the life-size dummies acting out the building of the railway, and models of famous names in war – Hitler, de Gaulle, etc - have unintentional and inappropriate comedic value. It’s the strangest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been here but I would recommend it, just as a surreal experience. One thing that particularly made me chuckle was a random board of buffalo skulls, beneath which it said ‘Please Conserve Thai Buffaloes By Not Killing Them’. I’m not sure if this was supposed to be ironic or not.
I decide to walk back to the guest house. This is a bad idea – it takes ages. The vague maps in the Lonely Planet guide give no sense of distance at all. But it does give me the opportunity to check out the bars flagged up in the guidebook, and see that they’re all a bit shit and touristy. I’ll know not to bother with them later.
At the guesthouse I have a beer and a cigarette on the lawn by the river, and stare at the palm tree above me as the sky darkens.
I go to the restaurant and there’s only one free table. I sit at it. There’s some lame sex comedy on the TV – American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile. It’s absolutely bloody awful apart from maybe the bits with Eugene Levy. The man is just effortlessly funny, no matter how shit the script.
A man sits down next to me at the table. I recognise him from last night – he was sat in the same chair at the same table with another, older man. I suddenly realize they’re locals and I’ve nicked their table. I say this to the man and he laughs and says not to worry, it’s a free country, he and his mate just normally sit there. I order a seafood pizza. I’m not really hungry but, again, it’s something to do.
The other, older, man comes over. He’s not so happy about me usurping their table. I ask him if he wants me to move across to the other side. He says he’ll be back later so it’s okay. I really have treaded on local territory! Later on after I’ve eaten the older guy comes over and sits down opposite me, grumpily saying, “So I’ve been relegated to this side of the table have I?” I find this quite amusing but I don’t laugh; I think I’ve offended him enough.
He’s a short, skinny guy in his 50s, maybe even 60s. It’s hard to tell his age as he has tanned, weathered skin. The other guy goes off to see his girlfriend and I’m left with the old geezer. He starts chatting away to me and I find myself in the equivalent of being sat in the pub with the old guy telling war stories. Called Keith, he tells me about his time as a waiter working on merchant navy ships. This mostly seemed to involve shagging the passengers and getting fired for it. I’ve never met anyone who’s been fired so much.
Then he tells me about the various shootings that have occurred in Kanchanaburi over the past decade – most famously the drive-by shooting of an Australian woman here last year. Her name was Pamela Fitzpatrick, she was only 26 – traveling Thailand with her sister on a working holiday. Keith says she probably just got in the way of a local issue, a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has a few more tales involving guns and basically makes the seemingly sleepy town a hell of a dangerous place to be.
He’s been here 15 or so years, and has only been home to Lancashire once in that time. He had his home flushed out by a flood in the late 90s. It’s a great story which involves him being woken up by the bed moving strangely to see the ceiling much closer than he expected.
Eventually he heads off, leaving me with a possibly more realistic picture (depending on how much exaggeration he put in) of life Kanchanaburi than the one I got from spending just one day here.
Feb 27
I wake up late. There really is nothing else to do in this town apart from what I did yesterday. All the other exciting stuff in the area – Erawan National Park, Wat Tham Mangkon Thong with its floating nun – involves a bit of a trip, which I don’t have time for in just one morning - I have to get back to Bangkok before five for a lesson.
I get a motorbike back to the bus station. I sit in what can only be described as a cage that is attached to the side of the bike, and you sit facing the driver. It’s very weird.
I get on the bus back to Bangkok and life goes back to normal - or what is normal for me at the moment, anyway - my brief adventure over.
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