River Kwae

It was time to get out of Bangkok, even if it was only for a day. Chiang Mai was to far away but I heard good things about the River Kwae Bridge (it's apparently pronounced Kwae and not Kwai in Thai as "Kwai" means Water buffolo and thai people would laugh at you - I heard, not my own experience :-))

Anyway I wanted to go to that bridge and wanted to do it by train. The very useful website www.seat61.com gave me all the information I needed.

I took a taxi early in the morning (very early) to Thonburi Station, which is on the other side of the river and not (easily) reachable by public transportation.

The first issue was to actually get a taxi that would take me to this station, as the first two drivers refused to take me once I told them my destination. The third driver agreed but brought me to the wrong station. Thanks to my mapswithme app I realized it was the wrong station before I got out of the taxi... (ahh technology can be so helpful sometimes).

He brought me to the right station in the end but with some trouble and a very close to the time the train should leave because in the early morning some streets in Bangkok turn into one-way streets to enable more commuters to get into town and quicker, and since we were going out of town this was not good news to us.

It turned out however that the train left at 7:50 instead of 7:30 as I had thought so the time was ok. Not much to do at this little, time worn, station with it's two or three tracks and only one platform. Pretty boring, or so I thought.

Many of the locals seem to have been very excited about something behind one of the parked trains. They ducked and tried to get a look under the carriages but I wasn't sure what was going on.
The more and more official looking people with uniforms and walkie talkies ran around and shouted commands across the platform. Most of the locals still tried to get a good view, taking pictures with their phones and the likes.

It turned out that a lady fell off the one train and got trapped under the rolling other train (our train) to Tok Nam and was dead. So the police came around and did all the things you see on TV... measuring, photographing, writing the report and stuff.

Then after about an hour they carried her away wrapped in a white linen.

Our train was obviously late by that time - not that this was any concern to anyone, considering that a woman just died a few meters away.

So we set out of the station in old railway car at 09:08 and were on the way into the jungle.
Suddenly we passed through a very large, brand new trainstation, seemingly in the middle of no-where, while all the other stations along the line had all seen much, much better days.

But then the journey really began, there was no air conditioning but the windows (and doors of course) were wide open and nearly all the ceiling fans worked. This however brought in many bugs and leaves from the outside, so that, after about an hour I was covered with a thin layer of forest life.
The sound of the wheels rolling along and clacking over the merging joints between the rails was quite loud but soon became a rhythm very familiar and I felt the adventure again.

There were a few tourists on board of the train but also many locals who got on and got off at all the little stations along the way.

At Ban Pong we left the main train track and used the "Death Railway" that was built by Allied Prisoners of War and Indochinese (Siamese, Malay and Burmese) forced by the Japanese under inhuman conditions. Everyone who saw the file "the bridge over river Kwai" will be able to testify that.

This track leads from the Thai rail network into Burma (now Myanmar) and was suppose to be used for material transportation for the Japanese.

After an hour or so on this infamous section of the track we arrived at the Bridge.
Right next to the station were two steam locomotives and a lorry with rail wheels set up in concrete which of course I took a picture of for my Daddy.

Then walking over to the actual bridge, it looked completely different than in the film (which was shot in Sri Lanka), there were no rocks, and the bridge, which is still used to this day for daily local was made from steel.

But this didn't bother me. I was able to walk across the steel bridge and walk a little bit into the jungle on the other side. On the way back I met Bjoern and Anke (two Germans) and we walked around for a bit, visited a nearby (and brand new built from poured concrete) Chinese temple and had some really good food at a little shack.

Since the train was delayed on the way out and it was the same train that returned back to Bangkok I assumed the train was going to be late to go back but didn't want to risk it (there is only one train back).

So I left the little (factually incorrect) museum that displayed German motorcycles from 1957 as Japanese bikes from the war a early enough to be at the station in time for a departure according to schedule.

Of course there was no train at 14:40... or for the next 3 hours. So, I sat around the station and waited, together with some other foreigners for the train. I used the time a little bit by writing postcards (who will get one this time?!) and falling asleep repeatedly.

It finally came across the bridge at 17:20 an we all jumped on and were happy to be on the way back to Bangkok.

There were only 3 or 4 people in the carriage that I sat in on the back. One of them a Japanese guy I talked to for some of the trip.

The windows were still open and some of the huts along the track were built so close I would have easily been able to touch their corrugated iron roofs by just stretching half my arm out of the window.
These people really lived with the railroad. Six trains daily, literately running through their front yard.
Finally back at Thonburi station I shared a cab back to a BTS (Skytrain) station with the Japanese guy and luckily the food court at Terminal 21 was still serving.

It was 10pm now and I was wrecked and went straight into bed and could only get through two or three pages of my book.