23rd January 2014

Today has been the first of our two full days in kanchananburi and having scheduled stuff in the out regions tomorrow we knew we had to cram in all the local visits today.  We started with an early morning stroll across the famous River Kwai Bridge which is right next to our resort - at 8.30 am we had the bridge pretty much to ourselves. Here English is not as widely spoken and maps provided were not to scale so sorting out our itinerary for the day was a challenge. So we hopped on an open taxi and for a couple of pounds were dropped at the Allied War Cemetary and spent a good amount of time paying our respects and walking up and down the rows of graves beautifully maintained by the the War Graves commission in the uk. The Cemetary was overlooked by Death Railway Museum which  was brilliant and consumed 2 hours of our time - both these visits in all a very emotional experience. Later in the day we visited 2 other museums and the Chungkai War Cemetary which had even better flowering shrubs than the first. Our visit to Chungkai was via a speedy long tail boat that you will see pictured here (yet again proving water to be the best mode of transport in Thailand). Tomorrow we are on an organised tour which takes the pressure off us planning and filling our day.