A Bad Romance over the River Kwai

We paid a visit to the bridge over the river Kwai. I have taken information from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the correct history surrounding the bridge:

“The notorious Burma-Siam railway, built by Commonwealth, Dutch and American prisoners of war, was a Japanese project driven by the need for improved communications to support the large Japanese army in Burma. During its construction, approximately 13,000 prisoners of war died and were buried along the railway. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 civilians also died in the course of the project, chiefly forced labour brought from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, or conscripted in Siam (Thailand) and Burma. Two labour forces, one based in Siam and the other in Burma worked from opposite ends of the line towards the centre.”

So basically, the crazy Japanese army had all these people build this bridge, in the worst living conditions, which saw half of them perish from being overworked, starved, and other horrors I try not to imagine too much. The whole event-excuse my language here-was fucked up and its a sad sad story.

The bridge over the river Kwai at sunrise

 The bridge had quite a few visitors during the day so we decided to come back at sunrise to get some better shots. They’ve also got a little train running on it for those who want to pay to be lazily taken across it. It’s a short walk across the bridge so unless you’re a kid you might want to walk to get the best views.

I tried to make the white statue stick out

I usually appreciate visiting places a bit more when its early morning-the weather is cooler and you usually have less people around. We arrived at a good time. For a good 15 minutes we were the only ones on the bridge.

Sunrise from the bridge

A memorial plaque

On our first visit to the bridge, I heard a familiar tune…Could it be? Yup. This awesome guy was playing a violin to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. I could not believe it. I figured you might not either, so I took this little video for you all. Its our first video post (yay!) so excuse any bad editing, I’m working on being a badass video editor.

Bad Romance

I was definitely not expecting him to play that song!