Found out at 8am this morning that the guesthouse only starts breakfast at 9:30, wtf is that all about. Anyway i took a walk up to the railway museum and war cemetary and found breakfast along the way.
It was at The Nine guesthouse, bit more expensive than the Smiley Frog but looks nice and in a quiet area. As you can see they have cat on the menu and it is really fresh.
I settled for egg on toast and a cup of tea.
Made my way to the Thailand-Burma Railway museum, not as boring as it sounds. The exhibits are well laid out and documented, they describe the story of the Japanese invasion and the building of the railway very well. Some of the exhibits are a bit graphic.
£3.63 entrance fee but you do get a drink with that at the end.
Spent about an hour altogether including a 10 minute film of veterans describing their experiences.
Of the 30,000 British pows around 7000 died during the building of the railway, mostly of malnutrion and diseases such as malaria and cholera. The Japanese offered false contracts to asian labourers to also work on the railway, they were treated even worse than the POWs and died in their tens of thousands, some of the Asian labourers had taken their families along on the false promises of the Japanese. There is no record of how many wives or childen would have died along the way.
There are quite a few good films about this period, Bridge on the River Kwai, To End All Wars, the most recent would have been The Railway Man.
Just across the way from the museum is the allied war cemetary,there are actually 3 in the area. Two thirds of this one seem to be British. As far as possible after the war the bodies of those who died in the jungle etc were recovered and identified and then laid to rest at the cemetaries around Kanchanaburi. The ashes of those cremated in the pow camps were also recovered and laid to rest here.
The cemetary is well maintained and cared far, each grave is marked by a headstone with the persons, name, rank, number and corps/ship. There is an index at the entrance which lists all the names, so any living relatives can easily find their graves.
There was actually a Thai school trip while I was here, the children had workbooks to identify various things about the cemetary, e.g youngest age, family name of the school teacher (who was English), which nationalities etc. Nice to see the kids so involved with their countries history, makes me wonder how many of kids in UK schools would know about what went on here.
Cup of ice coffee at Gravite on the way back, small coffee shop but the guy who runs it takes his coffee very seriously. Has no machines in there, he grinds all the beans by hand to order and uses drip feed method through filters. Takes a while but gives a purer taste to the coffee. I had one of the specials of the day, it was a Thai brand from the North. It tasted like just about every other coffee i have ever had but didn’t want to upset the guy after all his hard work.
Chicken Fried rice for lunch/dinner.
Been raining most of the evening so stayed at the guesthouse and had a bit of a feast for dinner/tea, spring rolls, pork with fried kaffir lime leaves and chilli, watermelon shake. About a fiver all in, the lime leaves give a really good lip smacking zing to the dish, The guesthouse gets good reviews for the restaurant but I find it only so so, everything i have had seems to be a bit over cooked.
The fruit shakes are good though.
Still raining so Netflix night on the laptop.
Go with Brian 