I am still fascinated by the fact that I awake every morning to find that somebody has silently pushed an English language newspaper under my door in the night containing an in-depth round-up of all the news from the west but only stuff about life in Thailand if the editorial team can seriously lay into the government for no apparent reason. This, in a country where mentioning in passing that you don't like the king very much will result in some men appearing at your door in the middle of the night to escort you off to jail for five years on a charge of lèse-majesté - insulting the monarchy - as US citizen Joe Gorden discovered in 2011 after he translated sections of a book called "The King Never Smiles" on the internet and then unwisely decided to visit Thailand. At the back of the newspaper, an entire page is dedicated to a selection of cartoon strips which presumably represent what the editor thinks make us roar with laughter back home - namely Calvin and Hobbes, Hagar the Horrible, The Far Side and Dilbert... and no, Dilbert still doesn't make any sense even over here. I imagine that the hotel's computer system must have automatically registered my nationality when I checked in and decided on my behalf what it is that I would like to be kept abreast of while I'm here. I have never been asked to select a newspaper, you understand, or indeed even if I need one at all - but it's nice to think that somebody somewhere is running around trying to second guess the requirements of the strange British man who goes out for a walk in the mid-day sun dressed for a siberian winter.

Because the departure time of my organised tour to Kanchanaburi had been carefully arranged to clash with the morning rush hour, there was slightly less than sod-all chance of getting the coach out of Bangkok before we'd all died of boredom and dehydration, due to the air conditioning unit being stuck on with sticky tape. Not that the concept of rush hour means much here, you understand, since being able to find a gap in the traffic through which to squeeze your bicycle will get you on the evening news. At one point, we actually saw a man jumping over a row of otherwise impassable cars in a way that I had previously thought you could only get away with if you were an actor in a Hollywood film trying to escape from the cops. Heading out of town, we finally managed to find our way onto a road where everybody was going in the other direction and started to make some headway, just as all the golden temples started to appear. We spent most of the morning sitting in traffic jams watching pedestrians in face masks trying to negotiate the traffic without dying of asphyxiation, and then five minutes sailing straight past all the scenery. This is the sort of thing that could only happen in Bangkok. Tall spires of gold and temple facades covered in intricately carved Buddha images whizzed by, glinting in the sun and begging us to stop for a moment, but our driver wasn't listening. His itinerary said that he had to get us to Kanchanaburi, and that was what he was going to do if it killed him.

I should explain here that motor vehicles in Thailand only appear to have two speed settings - stop and a thousand miles an hour. I'm pretty certain that passing a driving test in Thailand involves nothing more than turning up at the test centre sober and managing to sign your own name - and I don't even think they're too too fussy about the sobriety, to be honest. By the time we arrived in Kanchanaburi, most of us had spontaneously converted to Buddhism so we could pray for our lives at the little shrine on the dashboard where you might otherwise expect to find a nodding dog or a pair of dangling furry dice. If you're looking for a real white knuckle ride, forget Disney Land or Alton Towers - just head out to Thailand and take a bus.

Seventy miles north-west of Bangkok, Kanchanaburi War Cemetery contains the remains of nearly seven thousand soldiers from the Australian, Dutch and British armies who died here from malnutrition and exhaustion in Prisoner of War camps between September 1942 and December 1943, working sixteen hours a day to build the 415 Kilometre "Death Railway". The occupying imperial Japanese forces saw the construction of this link as their only way of moving reinforcements and supplies from Thailand to the Burmese (1) front where they were needed to hold back the British. In a large commemorative garden opposite the Kanchanaburi rail station, the graves are all laid out neatly in rows, a simple headstone naming each soldier resting within. Nearby, Wat Chai Chumphon temple is home to the JEATH war museum, a moving reconstruction of a Prisoner of War camp, maintained lovingly by a local monk. JEATH is an acronym taken from the initial letters of the nations involved in the fighting - Japan, England, Australia, Thailand and Holland. Inside the museum, a cramped bamboo hut houses a collection of memorabilia and harrowing photographs taken during the construction of the Death Railway. Many original artefacts are on display, including pistols, knives, and a reconstruction of the bomb which was dropped to destroy the Bridge on the River Kwai and the railway which crossed it. The JEATH museum, along with the PoW camp at Auschwitz in Poland, are two of the most moving and unforgettable places I have been in my life so far, and it is hard to find words to describe just how much these places remind us that we should never forget. The original Japanese engineers estimated that the Death Railway would take at least five years to build... The Imperial Army forced the prisoners to complete it in sixteen months on a diet of nothing but rice and vegetables. During construction, sixteen thousand PoWs and up to one hundred thousand labourers died from dysentery, cholera, malaria, starvation and exhaustion.

After the war, the Death Railway was partially restored and relaunched as a passenger service, running locals and tourists as far as Nam Tok. Although it is no longer possible to travel the entire length of the track, tourists can arrange to take a twenty minute detour north of Nam Tok by road to a disused section of track known, rather dramatically, as Hellfire Pass. Due to the unyielding work of a group of Australian and Thai volunteers, this area now serves as a museum and trail in memory of the workers who died there. The name "Hellfire Pass" is taken from the campfires that could be seen lighting up the sky along this section of track so that construction didn't have to stop at nightfall and could continue night and day until the workers dropped from exhaustion.

Of course, the main reason that most people flock to Kanchanaburi, whether because they have a genuine interest in history or just because they really enjoyed the film with Alec Guinness and don't realise that it is mostly a work of fiction, is the bridge over the River Kwai. It is possible to cross the narrow single track bridge by foot, something which many hundreds of tourists do every day, with no handrail separating visitors walking on one side from a long drop to the river below. Nevertheless, peering over the side into the abyss seems to be exactly what many people like to do here for kicks before boarding the train from Kanchanaburi to Nam Tok and negotiating the dreaded Wang Po Viaduct, something I shall be talking about in more detail tomorrow...

Tomorrow: Kanchanaburi to Nam Tok

(1) Burma is now officially called Myanmar, a name which has been wholly accepted by the UN. The UK and the US, however, are sticking their fingers in their respective ears and going "la la la" rather than choosing to entertain the idea, so to them Burma remains Burma. It's almost like being back at school.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.