The final leg of the Kanchanaburi tour is the Bridge on the River Kwai and the Death Railway. During WWII, Kanchanaburi housed a famous Japanese POW camp. Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers and local civilians lost their lives constructing a 258 mile railway from Thailand to Burma to avoid Allied camps in Malaysia and Singapore. The Death Railway is built alongside a mountain and surrounded by dense forest and the River Kwai, designed to make it harder for the Allies to find it and attack. Nearby caves that were once POW hospitals and are now temples filled with gilded Buddhas. The beautiful scenery presents a stark contrast to the utter brutality that occurred here in the early 1940s.
The railway, although no longer associated with death, is still operational and an open-air car passes by, filled with locals on their way home after a long day of work.
The Bridge on the River Kwai has been rebuilt since being destroyed by the Allies in 1945. On the surface the black metal bridge looks ordinary, especially when surrounded by vendors selling pork ball skewers and tourists in fanny packs. But if one pauses to read the nearby memorials about the 200,000+ who lost their lives, the vantage point quickly changes.
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