On the 3rd of April we took a tour from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi to visit The Bridge over the River Kwai.

On our way to the bridge we stopped in Kanchanaburi town to visit the cemetery where there were thousands of graves of the Allied soldiers who died building the River Kwai Bridge.They were brutally forced to do so, when they were taken as prisoners of wars by the Japanese during WWII.The main cemetery with its rows of gravestones was very touching. The ages of the dead were mind numbingly young; the average could barely be 25.

The history behind the bridge tells of how the Japanese extended their invasion of Thailand into the West of Burma. Their success was hampered by the difficulty in supplying troops with provisions and so a supply line, a 415km railway was built. The Japanese, using POWs and civilian conscripts, adopted a brutal and barbaric work regime that saw the completion of the railway in one year rather than the three it was estimated to take. Building the bridge so quickly cost the lives of thousands of men thats why the railway became known as 'The Death Railway' as apparently there were as many deaths constructing the railway as there were railway sleepers! The prisoners were made to live in squalor with a near starvation diet. We visited the musum which had several accounts of the conditions within the camps, it sounded really dreadful. Many of the soldiers perished, others caught diseases mainly malaria. They worked from dawn until after dark and had to trudge many kms through the jungle to getback to camp where Allied doctors could tend to the wounded.

After the war the dead were collectively buried in World War cemetries such as the one we visited in Kanchanaburi. Most of the men in this cemetery were Dutch, British,Australian and Canadian.Hopefully now they have a place where they can always be remebered!

When we got to the River Kwai Bridge we took a walk across it. It was pretty dangerous as the wooden walkway over the bridge had huge holes in it and because it was so busy tourists were clambering over one another precariously to avoid the gaping holes beneath them.

We then took a train ride on the 'Death Railway'. It was quite eerie as we found ourselves imaging how awful it would have been to have worked on the same tracks around 60 years ago. Makes you thankful that our generation haven't been subjected to such brutality.

It was nice to honour those that lost their lives in such a horrific way but also very sad to hear about the torture they endured.

Next stop Tiger Temple before returning to Bangkok.