I ended pursuing further my education on the Thai-Burma railroad (the Death Railway) by visiting the Hellfire Pass memorial museum and historical park. Hellfire was close to the top of the middle of the route between the two end stations, and was chosen by the Australians to erect a memorial monument to all the prisoners of war who toiled under inhuman conditions to construct the railway.
To get there I had to go about 100 km into the mountains, where I found a very modern facility with an interpretive center and all sorts of young people preparing the visitors for either the 500 m walk along the railbed to the monument itself, or the extended 2.5 km walk along the alignment to see the cuts made by the indentured labor, the places where embankments as tall as 10 m were built, and the deeper stretches that were covered by trestle bridges (now long gone). The whole alignment had been abandoned after the end of the war and had been reconquered by the jungle. It was not until the 1970's that a group of Australian volunteers conducted a survey of the area, located the old alignment, and the coordinated effort was made to expose 3 km of the route for visitors to walk as a living history lesson.
The cuts are the most spectacular portion of the recovered route. They were open by drilling dynamite holes with hand methods (hammer and bar bits), where one man would wield a 7 pound hammer to hit a bar held by another man, who would rotate it after every impact to make the hole advance. The railroad was built between October 1942 and December 1943, during which time the indentured crews built 600 km of track. The cuts, or passes, were a few hundred meters long and up to 25 meters deep, and even though they were cut through recrystallized limestones they were the nightmare of the construction crews. From August to October 1943 the Japanese engineers, pressured by their high command, established the Speedo work regime, under which the crews had to labor at the cuts for 16 hours, and then walk several kilometers in the dark to their encampments only to start all over again the following day. And all this while the Japanese overseers kept repeating the mantra of Speedo! Speedo!
The embankments were another Herculean task, where rock chips and soil had to be hauled to the low points of the route to backfill them to form embankments up to 10 m high. The broken rock from the cuts was often hauled to the low spots for this purpose.
There were many dozen wood trestle bridges built across the largest spans, and one steel bridge (the Bridge over the River Kwai). For the wood bridges the lumber had to be cut and transported to the bridge site, sometimes with the help of elephants, foundations had to be built, and then the trestle constructed. One of the bridges collapsed three times during construction and was dubbed the Playing Cards Bridge.
Interestingly, the Australian POWs are remembered for their good humor and camaraderie. Everyone had a mate, and although many of them died from emaciation or disease the story tells us that nobody died alone, with a mate always by their side.
Besides learning about the ordeal of the POWs it was good for me to go for a 5 kilometer walk through beautiful forest and with fabulous views of the valley of the River Kwai. The mountains I see in the horizon are Myanmar!
Moving farther north into the mountains I stopped at a hot spring that is obviously very popular among the locals because there were hundreds of people there. Silly me but I don't have a bathing suit and had to content myself with dipping my feet in the hot water of the pool where at least 20 people were enjoying a full bath. There are two hot water pools, right on the banks of a cold water river, so clearly the thing to do is to get all warm at the hot spring and then jump into the cold water to cool down. Fun!
I drove past a couple of large reservoirs and any number of national parks. So far I have not been quite convinced that a visit to a national park is a good investment of time or money. All of them seem to have a waterfall, but there is precious little information about other trails worth visiting. I will have to try next time I hit one in the early morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment