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Some holiday this is turning out
to be! I’ve never been so busy! Up at 7.30 for an early start as today we go to
the JEATH war museum. It is only quite small and run by one of the temples, set
up in 1977. JEATH stands for Japan, England, America, Australia, Thailand and
Holland, the main countries involved in building the “death railway” from Burma
to Thailand and crosses the famous River Kwae (or Kwai) and if you believe the
movies, the British were single handed responsible for destroying it and thus
wreaking havoc with the Japanese. Mmmmm – maybe not.
What was quite interesting was,
that in the beginning the Japanese were keen for photographs to be taken, and
they show healthy looking, smiling workers, but as conditions deteriorated
cameras were banned and a lot of the records are drawings the prisoners did
from memory when they returned home.
Next we headed to the raft house.
The best way to describe this is like a big mobile home that you find in a
caravan park, floating on the river. There were two sections, one was a big
function area used to eat in and later to party and karaoke and the other was
for sleeping and lounging during the day.
We were undecided amongst
ourselves what was going to happen next, did we just sit here on the edge of
the river and chill out? How were we getting to the Dragon temple, were we
jumping on a motor boat or going in a bus? The answer soon became clear as a
small motor boat pulled up, hitched himself to the raft house and towed us off.
After hurtling about like loonies
and cramming loads into every day it was nice to relax and chill a while,
watching the scenery pass by.
We cruised to a temple (surprise
surprise) that was a dragon temple, the steps up were in a tunnel which you
entered by the dragons mouth and climbed up, emerging from his tail. There was
a loud speaker system which was constantly reciting stories of people doing
good deeds and getting enlightenment, the lady telling the stories had a very
mellow voice and it was very hypnotic listening to her speak, but we couldn’t
understand a word because it was all in thai.
We went into the temple at the
top of the hill and were blessed by a monk, which involved burning incense
sticks and sprinkling us with water.
Then to make an offering to make
the spirits happy, we set off fire crackers outside. This seemed very
dangerous, was very noisy and immense fun!
Back on the house raft we cruised
some more and there were big rubber rings which we could float on down the
river. We cruised till about 4 pm and then stopped again to see a tiger temple,
but first we visited the local market and saw some weird and wonderful things.
The fish were still alive and swimming around in a bucket, deep fried chicken
feet, bags full of insects to eat, sweet coconut rice wrapped in banana leaves,
the ultimate recyclable packaging.
All the temples seem to be up
steps, not sure if this was some kind of symbolic thing, I never got round to
asking Sam, as I was usually too out of breath from climbing up. But climbing
up means there are some amazing views, we watched the sun set over paddy fields
and it was beautiful.
