Kwai Kwae and Koi

We had a really interesting day trip yesterday. We floated down the River Kwae in a bamboo raft to a hill tribe village. When we got there, we rode elephants and then visited the bridge on the river Kwae ("Kwai"made famous by the movie of the same name.) Most Americans know it as the river Kwai but in Thai that means water buffalo. Kwae is the correct name. And some foreigners call it Koi (which denotes a certain male body part. Enough said.) During Japanese efforts to expell European and American colonialism/imperialism from Asian countries, they built a railway connecting Burma, through Thailand to Singapore. They used forced POW labor and locals (who got paid a bit). The POWs were kept weak by near starvation, overwork and mental torture. The Japanese would put sand in the rice to make it unpalatable so the POWs would not want to eat as much. They also would stage accidental deaths via dynamite explosions to make examples of POWs who caused trouble or refused to work. They estimate about 1/2 of them died while working on the railroad. After the war, survivors came back to help locate and identify the dead that had been buried in unmarked graves by the various labor camps along the railroad.

Sorry to jump around a bit. The hill tribe people were very nice. Our driver made us these cool hats, using tiny twigs as fasteners.

Our driver turned around and motioned for me to come to the front. Wow! The ride is a gentle rocking side to side. The elephant was voice trained.

This elephant was trained to do tricks. He would take money tourists handed him and give it to a hill tribe lady. She in turn would give him a glass bottle of soymilk or potatoes. He would take it back to the person that gave the money and wait to get fed his snack. Then he would take the garbage and throw it in a trash bucket. Here he is stealing Soren's crown for another snack!

The POW cemetery includes mostly British and Dutch POWs. The Americans have been brought back to America for burial. I found this grave and the irony of life hit me (you know the kind that makes smart people need a happy pill or a drink?) A surreal conversation took place in my mind between Robert THE Bruce who fought Britain (the country that basically wrote the book on Imperialism) and this Bruce who fought for the British against Japanese imperialism. I heard him say, "What arrh ya dooin' man soo farr froom hoome. Ge' bahck ahnd teek keer o' yoor oon." Who can say under which type of imperialism Asian countries would more successfully flourish? (I vote neither since I support self-governance, or at least governance by consent.)

This is a Chinese cemetery nearby. Buddhists usually are cremated exept for the Chinese who engage in types of ancestor worship. I am emailing this pic to my professor who specializes in the history of death and dying. Soren correctly pointed out that these sites remind him of a mixture between the burial mounds we saw in Ireland and the highly decorated, colorful graves in Mexico. Good synthesizing Adventure Companion.

The view from the bridge. You can see a bit of the metal in the lower right hand corner.

We road on a portion of the railway on our way back into Bangkok. A sobering experience. Sometimes the past seems more alive to me than the present--good for a historian or a storyteller but difficult for numerous practical reasons.