This place was the site of the Bridge over the River Kwai. We stayed in a little bungalow just off the main river, over one of its tributaries. It was a little rustic, with one of those toilets that don't have a flush but have a big tub of water and a little pan and you have to provide the flushing action yourself. There is quite a knack to getting the optimal flushing action from this and it can take quite a while to clear things, let me tell you.
The Thai/Burma railway museum here was excellent. It gave a very good impression of the suffering of the POWs and how and why the railway was built. Outside was a really well kept war cemetery with, as always, a shocking number of graves. The graves had been painstakingly tracked down and moved from their original places in the jungle to the town to create a proper place for these men to be remembered.
The following day we took an elephant ride. This was not as smooth or graceful as we had imagined and we had to cling on whenever the elephant went up or down hill. It kept stopping, to the annoyance of the mahout, to eat pomelo fruits off the floor. We didn't mind, though and thought it was cool how the elephant squashed the fruit underfoot first to break the skin and then chewed the flesh out after.
After our elephant ride we took a bamboo raft down river and enjoyed a very peaceful ride through some beautiful countryside, we then had lunch where Ross got excited by feeding pineapple to enormous carp and catfish - they lunged out of the water to grab it from his fork. We were then taken to a hot spring (which was wasted on us because we found it much too hot to tolerate), stopped to feed monkeys and walked along and took a ride on the death railway. We ended the day by walking over the River Kwai Bridge, where bomb damage can still be seen on some of the supports.
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