After the Full Moon Kirsty, Simon and I set off for a huge bus journey up to bangkok which could have been done in half the time were it not for some uneccessary moving us around from different places within the same town. Anyway, one Xanax and I woke up in Bangkok after a ten hour kip... magic!
Bangkok is a dive. A smutty, dirty, complicated and disorganised dive. After one day there we decided to drop our passports off at the Vietnam embassy and get out of the city.
We got a train from bangkok to Ayutthaya, the old capital of Thailand. The town is built on an island in the confluence of three rives which is pretty impressive in itself, and formed a natural form of defence. However, after it was sacked a number of times by the Burmese the capiutal was moved to Bangkok. It still however houses some magnificent temples and Thai culture is more pronounced than in any other place I have visited yet.
Unfortunately, I wasn't too into the temples as I had some serious glands growing under my chin and a fever so went to the doctor who has given me some tablets and feeling better already. Saw most of the temples though and got a good feel for the town.
Day two and we headed to Kanchanaburi, the site of the River Kwai POW-built bridge. Our first stop was the JEATH museum which depicts a typical POW bunk and displays various atrifacts, pictures and newspaper clippings. My dissertation taught me that the two World Wars like most wars were a result of misplaced faith in the nation and religion -the two most important apparatus we look to for guidance.
The bridge itself, aside from the lights the Thai's have added for the tourists, is nothing but a typical, functional railway bridge. However it stands as a monument to the lengths people will go to when their faith is misplaced and they are misguided.
There is evidence that people themselves are not all bad, such as the statue of one Japanese officer who later worked to repatriate the bodies of those who perished working on the Bridge, the Australian Ernest Dunlop who performed basic surgery to save the lives of fellow prisoners, and the local Thai man who smuggled him basic drugs such as penicillin.
Following the museum we went by longboat to a local temple situated by a small cave system. After a few photos and risking life and limb on the wet, barely-secured, 30 foot high, ladder we travvelled on to one of the war cemetaries via a village of houseboats!
The war cemtary was really sobering. Some graves had really touching messages from parents, siblings and offspring, whilst some didn't, and some didn't even have names. I've never been to a war cemetary before and it's the closest I've come to the consequences of war which I'd only read about.
All in all, it's great to be doing some proper travelling again and actually seeing interesting things rather just getting pissed again and again, however much fun it is. Unfortunately, I've got to head back to Bangkok to pick up my passport and then it's off to Chang Mai for some trekking, hopefully with a few wreckheads I met in Phangan... so best of both worlds really!
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