Thailand: Death on the line

Crap hotel wifi doesn't make Thailand any less of a fascinating country.

As seems to be the way with my recent travels, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the historical hardships of others, and this one's close to home: during WWII my dad's dad was a Japanese PoW put to forced labour building railways in horrific conditions amid disease, death and desperation. He survived: very, very many did not.

It adds a piquancy to the tourist selfies at the Bridge on the River Kwai to know that the building of the track cost something like 100,000 lives. Brits, Aussies, Americans, Dutch, various enslaved Asians: all manner of nationalities manacled into a murderous logistics operation.

Jonathan Meades has a line about how a railway snaking into a German wood will forever signify horror; here, the railway was not the deliverer unto death, but the deliverer *of* death.

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