The Bridge Over the River Kwai

Monte and I have been in Lampang for now 6 weeks. We recently realized how we've spent that entire 6 weeks within the province of Lampang and haven't seen much else of Thailand... So we took advantage of the fact that Richard Lair had to go to Laos for a few days, got on a night train, and went to Kanchanaburi. Most of you probably know this town - the town that surrounds the bridge over the River Kwai.

This was a great experience. The town itself is very touristy, but the area around it is so beautiful. The bridge is majestic (well, only after you know its history...before that, you'd never know it was special). We learned a lot about WWII that school hadn't taught us. Monte and I are really discovering on this trip how eurocentric our education system really is. This realization really hit hard in Mexico when massive civilizations flourished (i.e. the Olmecs, Aztecs, Mayans, Zapotecs, etc) yet they were paid no attention compared to the Roman Empire. I never heard of these civilizations until I stumbled upon them on my own. The same thing is true with WWII. We spent so much time covering what was happening in Europe that I honestly didn't know that Japan had taken over most of Asia until college. I had no idea the atrocities and hardships took place.

For those who don't know the story of the bridge over the river Kwai...The Japanese occupied Thailand and wanted to build a railroad linking Bangkok to Burma to transport arsenal and to further their occupation. The construction of the bridge should have taken 5 years, but the Japanese forced their POW's (Burmese, Malays, Americans, Europeans, etc) to complete it in only 16 months. Over 100,000 men died during the construction of the Death Railway to Burma.



Apart from the depressing sites to be seen, we visited the Erawan Waterfalls. I had seen these waterfalls before, but I knew Monte would absolutely love them. It's a 7-tiered waterfall that you can climb up to, swim in, and in some cases slide down the rocks. After this we took a train ride over the bridge and went into a man-made cave that was used as a hospital.

We also saw some ivory being sold in the markets...This, as you can imagine, upset me a great deal. You can see the disgust on my face...Of course, I will report them. It was fun to get away from Lampang for a couple days. We got so settled here that things no longer seemed foreign or adventuresome, so getting out was a necessity. We’re going to try to get away more often.