THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511100073
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
AS I GLANCED UP from a sumptuous Thai lunch in the open-air pavilion of the Sai Yok restaurant just upstream from Bangkok, the scene was surreal: 11 young Buddhist monks, with shaved heads and flowing saffron robes, piled out of the back of a tiny Isuzu pickup and began to stroll single file across the Bridge on the River Kwai.
Later I would watch other pilgrims, treading with what seemed reverence on the wooden footboards, make the crossing of this infamous railroad structure. At least one, from North Carolina, whistled (badly) ``Colonel Bogey's March.''
Hours later, at dusk, I viewed it at greater distance from the boat dock of the Felix River Kwai Resort. It was empty of traffic now, hauntingly empty.
It is much smaller than I had imagined, lower to the water, black steel latticework resting on nine concrete pilings in the muddy, swift-flowing Kwai Yai river.
It is almost inconceivable that such a structure could have been crucial to the outcome of a global war a half-century ago. But this was the linchpin of the ``Death Railway'' the Japanese built with slave labor to supply their army in Burma.
And now restaurants, resorts. What would Alec Guinness and William Holden think? No, let's be factual about this.
The 1957 movie, which you must have seen at least once, was not even filmed here but in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), thousands of miles away. The bridge was always steel - much of what exists now is original - not wood and bamboo, and it was not blown up by the laborers. Allied bombs finally did drop the central span on Feb. 13, 1945.
The restaurants and the resort and the tourist industry that have grown up at the foot of the bridge in Kanchanaburi province a couple of hours northwest of Bangkok, make it difficult to grasp the intense suffering that occurred here during the war years.
The Japanese were not signators of the Geneva Convention of the humane treatment of war prisoners. What the movie does accurately portray is that this place, where the air is thick and damp and filled with the smell of mold and rot and the buzz of mosquitoes, was a living hell.
The several Allied cemeteries are but a small reminder. They contain only a fraction of the dead: 6,540 British, 2,830 Dutch, 2,710 Australian and New Zealanders. The 356 U.S. dead have been reinterred on American soil.
In the town of Kanchanaburi is a replica of a thatched detention hut with cramped, elevated bamboo bunks along with photographs and memorabilia of a typical prisioner-of-war camp.
It is a sobering experience in a once-appalling place, but it is impossible to comprehend actually BEING a Japanese POW unless one has been starved and beaten, caught malaria and had gangrenous infections go untreated . . . or, perhaps, unless one has been a POW in North Vietnam.
This day-trip is one of several that travelers can take to see Thailand beyond Bangkok. Some others:
Not far from the bridge, on the steep bank of the Kwai Noi River, are the ruins of an 800-year-old city. The principal structure, the Khmer Prasat Muang Singh (Tower of the City of Lions) is believed to have been the westernmost outpost of the Khmer empire centered on the Angkor Wat (in Cambodia, now known an Kampuchea).
The Khmer held sway over much of what is now Thailand until the 13th century. The ruins attest to the architectural genius of these people.
The temple is a distinctive Khmer form of a prasat, a cruciform sanctuary topped by a phallic-like tower known as a prang and symbolic of the mythological realm of the gods. Many were later converted to Buddhist use, as is this one, a Buddha image covered in floral offerings standing in the center of the crumbling structure.
Damneon Saduak, little more than an hour southwest of Bangkok, is Thailand's most vibrant floating market, where farmers in boats congregate each morning to sell their produce. And which is deluged daily by thousands of bus-borne tourists.
This is Thai tourism running rampant. Almost an assembly-line affair.
You're dropped off at boat dock, where you board a 20-or-so-passenger longtail boat - a narrow craft with an enormous engine and a long drive shaft (tail) extending from the stern. You speed through canals, lined with Thai houses on stilts, to the market, where the scene is, well, chaos. As many tourists with cameras as produce sellers. A photo op, definitely. Authentic? Only if you can keep other tourist out of your viewfinder.
When you're finished, you find your way to the nearby parking lot, as jammed with buses as the canals are with boats, to search for yours.
Are we having fun yet?
Hua Hin, about a four-hour drive south of Bangkok, is Thailand's oldest beach resort and has been the Thai royal family's summer residence since the 1920s. On the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand with broad white sand beaches, the town and the resort strip have changed little since then, maintaining a slower pace and a more relaxed ambience.
The town is small enough to walk around, but a better alternative is riding in a samlor, a three-wheeled rickshaw. Don't miss the night street market in the center of town, the quaint burgundy-and-cream building next to the train station that once served as a private waiting room for Thai royalty, and the vast and thriving waterfront fish market.
I stayed at the Dusit Resort and Polo Club, an elegant waterfront establishment so sprawling that I never found the polo field. Didn't have my string of ponies anyway. by CNB