Kanchanaburi in the monsoon season is one of those places where you are always a bit sticky, from sweat or a light drizzle. It doesn’t really bother me because it reminds me of places where I was sticky and quite happy, from the humid forests just north of Quito, Ecuador to the over-cultivated lowlands of Basse Guinea. My room at the Jolly Frog in Kanchanaburi—2 hours Northwest of Bangkok--is floating on the river like a houseboat, a few feet below the rest of the two story wooden hotel. It is either very cool or somewhat awful, a tranquil river idyll or the perfect place to stash an unloved bastard child. For the lights and fan to work, I must stick the pink plastic key --with my room number, G2 (Ghetto two?) written on it—into the power outlet. A slight step or a shove of the door from my neighbors “on board” the floating hostel annex reverberates through the room, like a slap from my estranged father (just kidding, dad).
I rented an automatic motorcycle, figuring it was the cheapest and most efficient way to hit all the sites, but mostly because a girl I know did it, it’s a very badass thing to do, and I fancy myself quite badass.
Standing in front of the motorcycle-rental-cum-massage-parlor, I have never seen a small businesswoman come closer to rejecting a sale.
“You ride before?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Where you go?” She asked.
“Hellfire pass.” I said.
“That is far.” She said.
“I am looking forward to driving very slowly and carefully,” I said.
She paused. “You keep your hand on the break,” She said.
Despite a few wobbling, zooming starts, and a neck aching from the strain of staring down every skid mark on the road like it might turn into an erect nail or an oily banana, I did okay. Still, it always amazes me how quickly you can transition from sheer terror to an unsafe sense of invincibility when learning to operate a speedy new toy.
The tourism here in Kanchanaburi is not what you’d expect from Southeast Asia—not hiking, not temples, not rafting, though you have those too—but World War Two History. Here is where Japanese army engineers forced hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs and conscripted Southeast Asians to build a 415 km-long railroad from Thailand to Burma in 1942-43. British colonial authorities had rejected the project, estimating it would take 5 years, but the Japanese completed it in less than 2 years by brutally mistreating the workers. Malnutrition, disease, and arduous work schedules of 12-18 hours per day killed more than 100,000 in the construction process, memorialized in the movie Bridge over the River Kwae.
I can’t decide if it’s fascinating and long overdue to shed light on a recent place and time where a non-white ethnic group, in this case, the Japanese, subjugated white people. It certainly departs quite a lot from the appropriately common narrative of European colonizers screwing over various non-white peoples in various ways since the late 1400s.
However, almost by the same token, it seems inappropriate to focus unduly on the Westerners who died here. While all deaths, particularly such cruel ones, are awful, and the toll was quite high, fixating on it feels a bit like reveling in our own victimhood, when over the last few centuries, white people have perpetrated so many awful acts against other groups. The three museums, two cemeteries and 1 shrine dedicated to the railroad’s construction mostly focus on the 12,000 Western POWs who died, even though 90,000 Southeast Asian conscripts perished. Admittedly, the Japanese kept better records of their Western captives, but the Museum makers were also probably thinking about their likely audience—Western tourists--when they designed the memorials.
Regardless of how it should be viewed, it was interesting to visit cemeteries filled with neatly cropped grass and white crosses bearing names like A.L. Wiggs, in a nation of Buddhists who cremate their dead...
...While riding a motor cycle...and aiming to appear somewhat badass.
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