Paved with Good Intentions?

I started out early this morning, intent on hiking the trail at Hellfire Pass, which was part of the Thailand-Burma Railway. In my rush to pack, vacate my room, and catch an early bus, I didn’t have time for breakfast, but I had a few bites of a PowerBar on the bus. (Thanks to Sarah for the brilliant suggestion of packing them just in case.) I arrived at the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum at 10am. The woman at the museum gave me my walkie-talkie (required for the hike) and told me I needed to be back by 1pm to make my bus back and the walk usually takes exactly 3 hours. (No pressure or anything.) The walk began with a long set of stairs down to the trail, which I knew would not be fun on the way back. The trail itself was 4km in each direction, but the terrain was reasonably flat (it is after all a former railroad bed) with some hills where bridges had once been.

Along the trail, I saw bridge abutments built by hand, bomb craters left by Allied attacks, and a station point with a double row of ballast indicating where trains could pull over to let another pass in the opposite direction. Note that there are no rails, though, because this section of the railway was dismantled after Japan’s surrender.

The following image shows one of the hills that had to be spanned by a bridge. The stairs on the right (installed for museum visitors) should give an idea of scale.

And here is where two rows of ballast come together to join parallel tracks at the station...

But the real draw was seeing the passes cut into the rock by hand. (I hope that these next two pictures give you an idea of the scale of these cuttings. It might be hard to see, but note the size of the canyon compared to the size of the railing in the upper left corner of the first picture.)

Towards the end of the construction, drills were brought in to speed up the process, but most of the cuttings were done by two-man teams hammering a spike into the rock by hand to create a hole deep enough for dropping in dynamite. After the explosion, they would have to clear the rumble by lifting the rocks into small railway cars and pushing them manually to be dumped. The reason this section of the railway was referred to as Hellfire Pass is that pressure had increased to finish the railway faster, so the men had to work in shifts around the clock. They said that the light from the torches that illuminated the pass at night as they worked on the cuttings reflected off their emaciated bodies and made it look as if they were truly in hell.

Along the walk, I listened to the audio commentary, which discussed the horrible conditions for the laborers and POWs, including lack of food and clean water, disease, and cruel treatment by the guards.

By the time I finished the return hike and got back to the bottom of the stairs to return to the museum, I realized I had only eaten a few bites of food today, so I ate some more of my PowerBar and drank the last of my liter of water. It was now 12:30pm, the heat of the day and I had been hurrying along the trail at a good pace, knowing that I had to catch that bus. As I began climbing the stairs, suddenly a wall of weakness and exhaustion hit me and it took me about 15 minutes to climb the 10 or so flights of stairs. You forget how lack of fuel can affect your body. I am not usually so absent-minded as to forget to eat prior to a hike and usually I bring more water.

As stupid as it was for me to undertake a hike with such poor preparation, I finally had at least a little appreciation for what these laborers and POWs went through. I had hiked 8km in 2.5 hours, twisting my ankle several times on the gravelly terrain, constantly swatting at bugs even though I was covered in deet, hungry from having eaten only half of a PowerBar, thirsty from having had only a liter of water, and weary from the midday heat and humidity even in the dry season. Then I thought of these men, swarmed with bugs in the rainy season with no protection and little clothing to cover them, fending off diseases like malaria and cholera, walking on sharp stones and uneven terrain with poor or no shoes, parched for lack of clean drinking water, starving because they were fed only a few small clumps of rice twice per day (1/4 needed to sustain men of this size, let alone physical laborers), hiking as far as I had just as their daily commute (sometimes as much as 6km each way over large hills), but then they had to work 12-16 hours doing hard labor such as hammering spikes, carrying rocks and timbers, felling trees, and laying rails. As I lay on a bench outside the museum, too exhausted to move, I thought of the anguish of feeling this way and worse for more than a year, with not a day off unless you were too ill to move. At this point, rather than just thinking this was a sad point in history as I had for the last few days, I finally truly appreciated the plight of these men.

That afternoon, I rode the fruits of their labor, on a portion of the railway that is still in service from Nam Tok to Kanchanaburi. The scenery is beautiful and I will let the pictures do the talking now…