Bangkok, Auytthaya and Kanchanaburi

Well it's our last week in Asia before we descend on unwitting friends and family in Australia for Christmas and the New Year.

We came back to Bangkok on 5th December in time for the King's 80th Birthday celebrations and spent the day with Nathan and Chai. After lunch and the crazy shopping experience known as the MBC Centre, we made our way down to the Grand Palace and joined another million people gathered on the streets in party mood. It was a huge sea of yellow t-shirts and Thai flags, bands and processions and it was just about impossible to move. We waited a couple of hours for a glimpse of the King as he and the Queen sped past on their way to the Temple. Protocol dictates that it is inappropriate to wave directly at the King but it is OK to wave flags and as the crowd saw the cavalcade approaching on the huge screens by the side of the road, there was some pretty serious flag waving and cheering. It took us about 2 hours to move about 50 yards to a good spot to see the fireworks and we waited another couple of hours for them to start. It was definately not the place for anyone claustrophobic or not keen on crowds, but I felt quite privileged to be a part of such a significant and sincere celebration. We eventually managed to get away, the four of us stuffed into the back of a tuk-tuk and had a superb meal cooked al-fresco on the street where Chai ordered about 26 different dishes between us. The evening ended with a couple of drinks in a club that was playing live jazz - I thought I'd spotted John Davis sat in the corner with a glass of red wine in hand, foot tapping at one point, but the person had gone when I went over. Has anyone seen him lately? It was a great day out - thanks guys.

Auytthaya was the ancient capital of Thailand until it fell at the hands of the Burmese in the late 18th Century. It is a city built on an island, encircled by three rivers and it is scattered with ruins and not-so-ruined strutures dating back to its halcyon days as a vital port, when it traded with the four corners of the world. At that time, over a million people lived there, compared to 90,000 today and it was known to many as the most illustrious city in the world. Only a matter of minutes after arriving in town, we found ourselves at the centre of preparations for a huge procession which was part of the annual Auytthaya Heritage Festival. There were thousands of people in the procession and it was a riot of colour and sound with paragliders circling ahead. Heading the line-up were 12 elephants, adorned in red and gold finery, complete with stick-on tusk extensions. We were the only people on the streets, everyone else was in the procession and Marc was like some BBC foreign correspondent, taking photos of everything and everyone, who were only too happy to pose, wave and dance for him. I had national flags thrust into my hands and did some patriotic waving from time to time to the delight of the carnival. The party carried on until the small hours but we didn't as we were absolutely exhausted from the heat. This week has been the hottest of the trip so far, we guess that it's been in the mid 30's all week. We spent the second day walking around the city with our copy of Lonely Planet, picking out the recommended sights and finished the day with a Vietnamese meal (a lot of this blog is about food isn't it).

Kanchanaburi was our next stop. It is the location of the Bridge Over the River Kwai and we walked over it to the strains of We Wish You a Merry Christmas in the background. There is a narrow steelplate footpath down the centre of the bridge, just wide enough for 2 people to pass, back-to-back. Just crossing the bridge was enough to concentrate on, then we heard the whistle of an approaching train and had to stand with others on a small passing-place platform on the edge of the bridge and wait for it to pass. As was becoming a habit by now, there was a festival in town and that evening there was a light and sound show on the bridge re-enacting the story of the bridge and its bombing by the Allied Forces. After a very slow and quiet start, the show literally exploded into action, with thunderous fireworks that shook you to the core. There were people on fire jumping off the bridge into the water below - I thought that they must have been dummies, but you could see them swimming ashore afterwards. There were those big bamboo watch-towers that you always see in war-films, exploding in flames and crashing into the water, great big chunks of 'bridge' fell into the river - it carried on for ages. It all finished to the sound of the famous Bridge Over The River Kwai film theme, which I had been whistling as I crossed the bridge earlier on.

On our second day we went to visit the Kanchanaburi Allied Forces War Cemetery that is the final resting place of nearly 7ooo British, Dutch, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Prisoners of War along with 300 unknown soldiers who perished from starvation, disease, physical abuse or just sheer overwork at the hands of their captors during the construction of the infamous Death Railway. Another 6000 lie in two cemeteries along the railway, but there are no such resting places for the 100,000 Asian Forced-Labourers who died alongside the Allied Prisoners. The American soldiers were repatriated after the war. The cemetery is very serene and immaculately kept and people walk silently up and down the rows, reading the moving inscriptions on the stones from families far away. We laid flowers on the stone of T.Davies, Bombadier with the Royal Artillery, one of four stones we found within a short time that had Welsh inscriptions.

We had a bit of exercise on the third day in the Erawan National Park with a short trek to the 7-tiered Erawan waterfall and its clear blue pools. The National Park operates an excellent system to stop litter being left in the park. Any plastic drinking bottles taken into the park have to be 'registered' at the bottom of the track. The bottle is numbered and a book is completed with a name and nationality against each bottle and a 10 baht deposit paid. When you return at the end of the day, you take your bottle back to be recycled and you get your 10 bahts back otherwise you are named and shamed. Simple eh? We walked on paths through jungle to the top level and saw a troop of monkeys swinging above us in the trees. We had been warned earlier on that monkeys may try to run off with trekkers' possessions, so we made sure that ours were tied to trees when we went swimming in pools where the fish nibbled at our arms and legs - a very weird feeling.

That afternoon we went to see the Death Railway Hellfire Pass where POW's had excavated a long cutting through solid rock and we walked along the original rail sleepers. In some places the cutting is 25 metres deep and every bit was cut by hand by men working shifts of 18 hours, day and night while being beaten mercilessly. There was also an excellent museum where, like everyone else there, we walked around in complete silence, appalled by what we were reading and seeing. The day ended with a journey on the railway. The Allied Forces disabled the railway by removing some sections as did the Thai Railway years later but 130 miles out of the original 300 are still in use today. "A Life for Every Sleeper".

And today sees us back in Bangkok, doing essential things like confirming our flights out to Australia tomorrow and getting all our washing done properly in a machine for a change, instead of being trampled in the shower - I hope they don't mix the coloureds and the whites.

Thanks to everyone who has read the blog and posted messages and to those who have sent e-mails saying that you're enjoying it - it encourages us to do a bit more. And if you haven't posted a message yet - what are you waiting for?

See you in Oz ...