Our son is living in Bangkok on a 2 year working stint and we're here to visit. After all, there are grandchildren to spoil.

We are not tourists but temporary visitors, boarding in the spare room of a large villa in the elegant Nichada Thani suburb. The smart uniformed guards at the gates snap to attention when they see the diplomatic plates on my son's car. We drive though the beautiful streets of Nichada and we admire the orchids growing off the trunks of the palm trees and in the clay pots.

Last weekend we drove out of the city for a two day stay-over to Kanchanaburi, a town about 3 hours to the west of Bangkok and about a hundred miles from the Burmese border. The name of the town meant nothing to me, but as we drove in I received a shock in the form of a sign pointing the direction to the River Kwai.

From then on, everything we saw related to the River Kwai and to the infamous bridge on the River Kwai. We passed the large military cemetery in the main street of the town and then swung into a parking space fifty yards from the bridge itself. I was breathless, remembering scenes from the movie and the book. I walked across the bridge. It is not the one built by the prisoners of war. That was destroyed by Allied Bombing. This is a later bridge of steel arches. I am prepared to bet that many of the wooden sleepers and perhaps many of the wooden pieces in the structure are original.

I remembered the agony of the prisoners, sweating in the inhospitable climate, not only suffering from every conceivable tropical disease but also from the inhuman treatment of their captors. They had paid with their lives for this railway line and the bridge.

We stayed overnight some forty miles upstream on the river at a resort called the Kwai River Resort. The resort is magnificent, with comfortable rooms, swimming pools, a waterfall, a small petting zoo and of course, a small museum containing information, pictures and maps of the railway line and the bridge. Here I read that 60,000 prisoners and 300,000 Asian laborers had worked on the line and of these 12,000 prisoners and 100,000 laborers had died. Legend says a man died for every sleeper laid.

From the balcony of our room, waving my arms to keep the mosquitoes at bay, I looked out over the lazy brown river and the impenetrable jungle beyond. I tried to imagine what those prisoners must have felt when they were marched in by their captors and told to set up camp. It must have looked then, like it does now, an impossible mission. Where would one dig the first hole or which tree would one cut down to get things moving?

There cannot be many survivors of that awful camp remaining alive today, but one thing is sure, they were heroes, every one of them. And the bridge remains a harsh reminder of man's inhumanity to man.

Tags & Keywords : Travel, Thailand, Bangkok, River Kwai