Kanchanaburi: River Kwai and the Tiger Temple

Sunday Evening, December 10

I have been taking it easy the past 2 days after returning to Bangkok. I slept late, went to the hotel gym. And in the afternoon on Friday, I went to a movie. On Saturday afternoon I went to visit the Panthip Plaza which is a 6 floor shopping mall dedicated to selling digital and computer items....a great place to watch people. Last nite I met Cousin Jean Walzer again for dinner and we went to a small French restaurant....Le Bouchon.....a favorite of hers that is tucked away in the middle of a notorious redlight district.


Today, I went with a guide and driver to Kanchanaburi which is about 135km northwest of Bangkok. It is along the route of the Death Railway, the 415km WWII supply route the Japanese tried to establish from Bangkok to Burma using forced labor of 30,000 Allied POWs and 200,000 local impressed laborers from China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia. Of these, 16,000 prisoners and 100,000 laborers died of disease and starvation.
A bridge along this route was made famous by the movie "The Bridge Over the River Kwai."

We visited the site of the bridge, which is a pretty riverside tourist trap....I bought a tee-shirt. We also ate a good lunch at a floating restaurant:

The area is memorialized by a well kept cemetery of prisoner graves:

As well there is a museum about the working conditions and hardships of the laborers called the JEATH Museum. JEATH stands for the countries involved: Japan, England, America and Australia, Thailand, and Holland. It is a very solemn experience.

After lunch we took a half hour long-tailed boat ride down the river. This is a photo of a chinese-type pagoda on the riverside:


In the afternoon we stopped at the Tiger Temple with started as a Buddhist monastery, and has evolved into an animal sanctuary and now a petting zoo of sorts. For a small donation you may have your picture taken among the tigers that they have there:

It is under fairly controlled circumstances with an experienced Monk there to keep the tigers docile (although one wonders if they are actually drugged) and strict rules as you are led by hand through the area and you must leave any hats outside and you can't wear a bright colored shirt. They claim that no injuries have been incurred by tourists.


Tomorrow I go down to the beach resort of Pattaya for a week to end the trip.