Thai break

Cara (Aer Lingus) 1989

There’s an inscription on one of the many headstones in the Allied War Cemetery just outside the small town of Kanchanaburi, the fording point of the River Kwai in Western Thailand. It’s in Irish:

Go ndéanfaidh Dia trócaire ar a anam

I came across it by accident while rambling through the neat rows of war dead. It’s estimated that 16,000 POWs and 49,000 forced labourers died while building the ‘Death Railway’ from Bangkok to Burma for the occupying Japanese forces. The Allied war Cemetery on Sundays is a kind of picnic site for the many Bangkokians who make the journey up on the train for a breath of fresh air after the top-quality carbon monoxide we have been breathing all week. It’s well kept and shady, and what better way to honour the dead, most of whom were under 25, than to include them in a bit of innocent leisure activity.

The train to Kanchanaburi and the River Kwai (pronounced Kway) leaves the Thonburi station in Bangkok exactly at eight o’ clock. It’s a four-car diesel contraption, third class from beginning to end, and a marvellous introduction to tropical delta scenery if you’re limited in your time in Thailand. The flat rice paddies are criss-crossed by khlongs, or narrow-gauge canals, and up and down these waterways vendors on boats ply their wares. In fact vendors are everywhere in Thailand: the train has its quota selling barbequed chicken, dried squid, coconuts and delicious iced coffee. The Thais are a food-loving people, and no wonder: they have one of the finest cuisines in the world.

Kanchanaburi is an old Chinese trading town on the route which used to cross the Cochin-China peninsula from the South China Sea to the Andaman Sea.

Nowadays the borders of Vietnam, Kampuchea and Burma are all closed so the town has lost some of its lustre: but it is fast becoming a unique tourist focal point.

When you alight at the train station (if you’re a softie there’s an air-conditioned bus hourly from the capital) you can hire a pedicab, the rickshaw’s big brother, and ask the boy to take you to the bridge. The infamous Bridge Over the River Kwai is about fifteen minutes pedalling away and there are good restaurants at either side of it where you can sample seafood and river fish. It’s a very pleasant spot for sitting out on a bamboo terrace with a Kloster beer and a panorama of densely foliaged hills separating you from Burma.

There’s a little sleight of hand here though, in typical Thai manner. The real Hollywood bridge, the one Alec Guinness helped to blow up, is in Sri Lanka where the film was shot on location. Of the original bridge, made from materials brought from Java, only a few bits remain to give it some authenticity. The rest, ironically, was made in Japan in the 1960s. Now, to top the confusion, a Japanese construction company is bidding to extend the line up to the Burmese border and to open it to full-scale tourism. Japanese economic pull is very evident these days in Thailand. Needless to say, there is some opposition to this idea, particularly from the POW veterans who make frequent commemorative trips to the site of their former incarceration. Feelings run high. History is everybody’s flogging horse.

There’s a TAT office (Tourism Authority of Thailand) in town and a variety of accommodation can be arranged, from rafts on the river to luxury hotel rooms. There are long boats which motor up to the end of the line at Nam Tok and beyond to the River Kwai Village Hotel. This is the kind of place where you would expect to find Somerset Maugham or Noel Coward smouldering deep in a rattan armchair with a stiff drink. It’s a first-class hotel with swimming pool, gardens and caged kestrels, monkeys and other assorted wildlife.

The last time I made the journey to this outpost (it’s on the way to the famous Three Pagodas Pass, a smuggling point for the Thai-Burmese black market deep in the mountains) I expected a quiet, writerly weekend with the bar to myself. The waiters were unloading crates of Kloster beer and bottles of Mekong whiskey (more like rum and quite o.k. with Coke) onto the forecourt of the hotel in preparation for some function.

I found out the reason for this stocktaking later that night. The Kosangas boys had arrived on a Thomas Cook (Grafton Street, Dublin) package, and after two winters in Ireland they were enjoying the heat and their perk away from home. The spicy hot dishes arrived: garupa, squid, river prawns and lobster, and the waiters had been astute in their foresight. It was a gas evening and afterwards there were big, lumbering men hesitantly walking down by the river, tapping the path in front of them in case there were snakes, or iguana or baby crocs. On previous trips I had seen all three.

Along the river’s length there are numerous waterfalls and cave temples (where anchorites or hermit monks at one time or another lived and meditated). One of the most spectacular is the Erawan Falls in the Erawan National Park – Thailand has a very extensive and well-run National Park network which tends to lose out to the seamier side of its tourist industry. There are seven levels to the falls, each one more spectacular than the last as you wend your way up along them through formidable jungle. You can reward yourself at the top with a cool dip – though the little fishes like to nibble at white flesh. The rainy season (May-October) is when the falls are at their most spectacular. For the nature enthusiast the Electricity Authority rents very reasonable bungalows overlooking the huge lake created by the Erawan dam.

If you have time you should look out for an innovative school and village community situated along the river north of Lat Ya, 25 kilometres from Kanchanaburi town. It’s called the Children’s Village School and is a combination of A. S. Neil’s famous Summerhill and a Buddhist approach to education, complete with its own natural farm. The children are mostly from the slums of Bangkok and they benefit from a relaxed, informal schooling in the heart of nature. If you like children, they’re always happy to show the visitor around and to practise their English.

For a river that has seen so much of death and human misery, the Kwai has an abundance of life along its banks. The Northern Irish poet, Frank Ormsby, has written movingly about this contradiction in his poem ‘The Diary’:

I buried it in the cemetery at Chungkai

Two rolls of jotter in a thermos flask

Filched from the Raffles College at Singapore,

And dug it up in 1945 on a daytrip from Bangkok.

So much I had forgotten, sights and sounds

Of a year in the jungle: lime trees and red chillies

Growing wild at the edge of the compounds,

Cicadas, jungle frogs, the cool poignance of the

Evening bell from the Italian mission.

Raffles College and the Italian Mission have gone but the cemetery at Chungkai is still there unchanged, as are the lime trees and the red chillies. With a bit of fish on a quiet bend in the river and some fresh lime juice it almost seems like paradise.