Kanchanaburi

This is the Commonwealth War Cemetery where some of the POWs who died building the Burma-Thailand railway are buried. It’s in the middle of Kanchanaburi town, opposite a museum about the railway. It’s very well looked after. There were four Thai women weeding and watering the graves. The museum was interesting and included information about the Asian workforce who also worked on the railway. I knew a bit about the conditions for the POWs and the high death toll, but I hadn’t heard about the Asian workers.

They were mostly recruited with false promises of good wages which turned into forced labour. They were mostly from Malaysia (Chinese and Tamils), Indonesia, and Burma. Many brought their families with them. Their living conditions were even worse than the POWs. Under the Geneva Convention, the Japanese had to keep records of the POWs so the names of all those who died are recorded but since the Japanese didn’t have to keep records about the Asian workforce, no one knows how many people died. They estimate up to 90,000.

There was a ceramic poppy in the museum that had come from the display at the Tower of London in 2014, donated by a family in memory of a POW.


Yesterday I’d been looking at flights to Vietnam online when I suddenly remembered that if I want to stay more than 15 days, I need a visa. So late last night I was fighting with the wifi connection to try to submit an application for an e-visa. The wifi wasn’t stable enough to process the payment so I couldn’t to do that until this morning. It takes 3 days to come through, so I decided to stay in Kanchanaburi until then, mainly because I don’t want to go to Bangkok! The guesthouse overlooks the river with a lovely view and I need a bit of time to figure out where I’m going to go once I get back to Vietnam.