24th January 2014

On our last day at the River Kwai we booked into a tour visiting the the Hellfire Pass about 50 miles north of Kanchanaburi.  Here we learnt even more about the Burma-Thailand Railway and the suffering that went on there.  Hellfire Pass was the name given to it by the PoW's because much of the work was done at night under torch light.  Before this, our tour included a visit to the Erawan Falls. It was a fairly strenuous two hour work out as we climbed up and down the 7 tiers of the falls. It was very beautiful and lots of people stopped off to bathe in the pools on the way up.  After lunch and a further hour on the minibus we arrived at the Hellfire Pass Museum. This repeated to some extent what we learned in the museum visits in Kanchanaburi. We then descended some steep steps from the Museum down to the old railway track bed that led after a short walk to the Hellfire Pass Cutting where the conditions were particularly bad for the men who worked there., We were then taken to the Thamkra Sae station half an hour away for a 30 minute train ride on part of the 130 km railway that still functions today.  After a brilliant day we arrived back to our Hotel at 5.45 just in time for sunset.