Raaaaarrrrr!
It’s the last day in Kanchanaburi and we are on the trip which really led us to this part of the world in the first place.
Last year my pal Jonny came back from Thailand with hundreds of photos of him sitting with a tiger lolling about his lap. Within a day of seeing these photos I had scheduled a trip to The Tiger Monastery on our Thailand itinerary. The deal is here at the Tiger Sanctuary is that these are tigers that have been rescued. They’ve maybe been rescued from illegal poachers,found injured or are cubs found abandoned after a mother has been killed. They are looked after by a group of Buddhist monks and rangers. Most have been reared from cubs in the sanctuary to adulthood.
Any tiger cubs born in the sanctuary are not allowed contact with the visitors as they are released back into the wild as soon as they are able to fend for themselves. At the moment there are only thought to be about 250 tigers in Thailand. Apparently a lot of the poaching (read, “killing”) is for the Chinese medicine market, where a tiger’s penis can fetch thousands of dollars as it is believed to have virility enhancing powers, if you know what I mean. Get some bloody Viagra over to Beijing quick!
My boy and a real tiger…..
Oh my God, someone’s put my girl onto a real tiger’s belly…..
You don’t really need anything more do you?
Look at my boy rolling about with a fully grown tiger! Look at my girl sitting on a tiger’s belly! The chief monk made a bee-line for her, and took her straight over to meet the tigers. Mum and Dad had to wait in line with all the other Muggles. Mum and Dad look on, terrified. Eve’s thoughts on the matter?
“The tiger was itchy.”By comparison, look at John and I tentatively touching a tiger…..
I really wanted to touch its head but they wouldn’t let me. Something to do with the big teeth, I think.
In reality you only got about two seconds with any of the tigers. The monks or rangers chaperone you and are understandably nervous as hell. You only get enough time to pose with the tiger as your photo is taken. Of course, you also have to sign a document on the way in that more or less says, “Tigers may eat you, don’t hold us responsible. You went in of your own free will.”
No matter how tame these beasts seem to be, you’d best never forget that tigers are wild animals. They have a tendency to take your face off.
The tigers are kept in large cages and are trotted out once a day for about an hour to see the visitors, and you can get a chance to lead the tamest one (seen below) back to her pen.
This is the first tiger reared from cub to adulthood in the Monastery
I was slightly disappointed you didn’t get more time with the beasts but there were about fifty people there. It was great just to watch them, though. I’ve got more photos of the tigers than my own kids.
But look at this…this is one of the monks being asked for some cat food (a cooked chicken) by doing the same thing our cat Harleyboy does when he’s hungry…by being a big sook. This enormous beast rubbed its face up against the monk’s like a big moggy. This photo kind of captures it.
Later on we share our pickup truck back to Kanchanaburi with a London backpacking couple of physiotherapists called Laura and Dan and a German couple called Melanie and Robert. They are all staying at the Apple Guest house where we had planned to eat for our last night.
The Apple runs a Thai cooking school and food is supposed to be great. So that night we head down and meet up with our fellow tiger fanciers. We have a great night and I even speak a smidge of German again. Little point other than some practice for me, as Melanie’s English is as good as mine, but the two of them seem to like the fact that I give it a go.
So goodbye Kanchanaburi . Quite possibly the best two days of the trip so far.
Tomorrow we’re off back to Bangkok and one night of extreme luxury in the Davis Hotel before heading home….Oh and it just happens to be “Songkran”, Thailand’s New Year.
Raaaaarrrrr!
It’s the last day in Kanchanaburi and we are on the trip which really led us to this part of the world in the first place.
Last year my pal Jonny came back from Thailand with hundreds of photos of him sitting with a tiger lolling about his lap. Within a day of seeing these photos I had scheduled a trip to The Tiger Monastery on our Thailand itinerary. The deal is here at the Tiger Sanctuary is that these are tigers that have been rescued. They’ve maybe been rescued from illegal poachers,found injured or are cubs found abandoned after a mother has been killed. They are looked after by a group of Buddhist monks and rangers. Most have been reared from cubs in the sanctuary to adulthood.
Any tiger cubs born in the sanctuary are not allowed contact with the visitors as they are released back into the wild as soon as they are able to fend for themselves. At the moment there are only thought to be about 250 tigers in Thailand. Apparently a lot of the poaching (read, “killing”) is for the Chinese medicine market, where a tiger’s penis can fetch thousands of dollars as it is believed to have virility enhancing powers, if you know what I mean. Get some bloody Viagra over to Beijing quick!
My boy and a real tiger…..
Oh my God, someone’s put my girl onto a real tiger’s belly…..
You don’t really need anything more do you?
Look at my boy rolling about with a fully grown tiger! Look at my girl sitting on a tiger’s belly! The chief monk made a bee-line for her, and took her straight over to meet the tigers. Mum and Dad had to wait in line with all the other Muggles. Mum and Dad look on, terrified. Eve’s thoughts on the matter?
“The tiger was itchy.”By comparison, look at John and I tentatively touching a tiger…..
I really wanted to touch its head but they wouldn’t let me. Something to do with the big teeth, I think.
In reality you only got about two seconds with any of the tigers. The monks or rangers chaperone you and are understandably nervous as hell. You only get enough time to pose with the tiger as your photo is taken. Of course, you also have to sign a document on the way in that more or less says, “Tigers may eat you, don’t hold us responsible. You went in of your own free will.”
No matter how tame these beasts seem to be, you’d best never forget that tigers are wild animals. They have a tendency to take your face off.
The tigers are kept in large cages and are trotted out once a day for about an hour to see the visitors, and you can get a chance to lead the tamest one (seen below) back to her pen.
This is the first tiger reared from cub to adulthood in the Monastery
I was slightly disappointed you didn’t get more time with the beasts but there were about fifty people there. It was great just to watch them, though. I’ve got more photos of the tigers than my own kids.
But look at this…this is one of the monks being asked for some cat food (a cooked chicken) by doing the same thing our cat Harleyboy does when he’s hungry…by being a big sook. This enormous beast rubbed its face up against the monk’s like a big moggy. This photo kind of captures it.
Later on we share our pickup truck back to Kanchanaburi with a London backpacking couple of physiotherapists called Laura and Dan and a German couple called Melanie and Robert. They are all staying at the Apple Guest house where we had planned to eat for our last night.
The Apple runs a Thai cooking school and food is supposed to be great. So that night we head down and meet up with our fellow tiger fanciers. We have a great night and I even speak a smidge of German again. Little point other than some practice for me, as Melanie’s English is as good as mine, but the two of them seem to like the fact that I give it a go.
So goodbye Kanchanaburi . Quite possibly the best two days of the trip so far.
Tomorrow we’re off back to Bangkok and one night of extreme luxury in the Davis Hotel before heading home….Oh and it just happens to be “Songkran”, Thailand’s New Year.
Kanchanaburi and the POWs
Monument for those POWs whose remains couldn’t be found
Bit of history fill in for you first. Kanchanburi is the site of the famous River Kwai and the legendary Bridge on the River Kwai. If you are reading this and have never seen David Lean’s “Bridge on the River Kwai” with Alec Guinness, I would suggest you don’t own a TV, or don’t live in the UK, as it is shown about once a year. It’s a great film; rent it if you haven’t seen it. Particularly if you’re one of those people that thin Alec Guinness was only Obi Wan Kenobi.
The Bridge is part of the Death Railway, so called because in Japan’s attempts to conquer South East Asia in the second world war, they used mainly British, Dutch, Australian Prisoners of War and Malay, Thai, Indonesian men as slaves to build a railway to link Bangkok with Burma, as a supply route for the Japanese army. During this time (1943-1945), the POWs we’re hardly fed, forced to work 19 hours a day, given next to no medical assistance and brutalised generally. A railway that should have taken four years to build was built in sixteen months and the first train that traveled along it was full of prostitutes for the Japanese officer.
Over 100,000 POWs died and many more Thai, Malays, Indians and Indonesians also died as a result of malnutrition, disease, blood poisoning or execution. Here is the War cemetery in the centre of Kanchanaburi. A great deal of Scottish soldiers are buried here, from the Gordon Highlanders, Argyll and Sutherland regiments alongside English, Welsh, and Dutch. Most were 20-30 years old. There are a lot of British and Dutch in Kanchanaburi visiting the various sites of remembrance. On Koh Lanta for example, we met a couple who had visited the cemetery to see the grave of an uncle who had died as a POW. I wonder how many more we saw today had a personal connection.
The railway is still in use today but the original rails have been replaced. You can still see the original structure in places such as this viaduct. Small gauge rails with 1943 stamped into them. Many men died here, from accidents, either by falling rock or drowning whilst building the railway. We went on a train along the Death Railway and every minute you are thinking about what went on here. You know the facts but we have absolutely no real concept of how horrific it must have been for these men. The whole time we were in the area of the River Kwai and the cemetery was incredibly sobering.
Despite the heinous acts committed by the Japanese Army in this area (using POWS as slave labour, poor nutrition and lack of medical care are all contraventions of the Geneva Convention) I am most surprised to see a great deal of Japanese tourists. I’m not sure about how I should feel about this. Particularly at the Bridge on the River Kwai itself there’s the usual Japanese malarkey of photographing one another a thousand times over, posing smiling in front of whatever landmark they are visiting. This poses a couple of questions for me.
- How is this war taught in Japanese schools- i.e what have these people been taught about the actions of the Japanese during this time?
- Am I being unreasonable to expect that Japanese people maybe don’t visit this site of the darkest part of their history?
- That aside, if we say that yes, the Japanese should visit these areas in the same way that German children are taught about the Holocaust in honest detail, should a little bit more decorum and respect be present?
Having spent a good deal of time in Germany I can never imagine German people to visit monuments to the Holocaust and be larking about, taking snaps in front of the “Arbeit Macht frei signs”. That just wouldn’t happen.
Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way anti Japanese. I hope one day to visit Japan, but it strikes me as odd that this be an area marketed to Japanese tourists. We have been in three other areas in Thailand and have seen next to no Japanese. Kanchanaburi is full of them. Do Americans visit Hiroshima? Is it long enough ago that we should move on? Am I being overly sensitive? After all these people are not responsible for the sins of the previous generation. They have as much to do with the actions of the Japanese Army as I do with British Imperialism and slave trading.
I don’t know, I can’t help thinking of the families who have placed messages and wreaths of remembrance for their fathers and grandfathers in Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, or of the few surviving POWS who return here for reasons of their own. How do they feel about a Karaoke barge full of singing middle aged Japanese tourists floating down the River Kwai belting out “Rawhide” in Japanese?
Kanchanaburi and the POWs
Monument for those POWs whose remains couldn’t be found
Bit of history fill in for you first. Kanchanburi is the site of the famous River Kwai and the legendary Bridge on the River Kwai. If you are reading this and have never seen David Lean’s “Bridge on the River Kwai” with Alec Guinness, I would suggest you don’t own a TV, or don’t live in the UK, as it is shown about once a year. It’s a great film; rent it if you haven’t seen it. Particularly if you’re one of those people that thin Alec Guinness was only Obi Wan Kenobi.
The Bridge is part of the Death Railway, so called because in Japan’s attempts to conquer South East Asia in the second world war, they used mainly British, Dutch, Australian Prisoners of War and Malay, Thai, Indonesian men as slaves to build a railway to link Bangkok with Burma, as a supply route for the Japanese army. During this time (1943-1945), the POWs we’re hardly fed, forced to work 19 hours a day, given next to no medical assistance and brutalised generally. A railway that should have taken four years to build was built in sixteen months and the first train that traveled along it was full of prostitutes for the Japanese officer.
Over 100,000 POWs died and many more Thai, Malays, Indians and Indonesians also died as a result of malnutrition, disease, blood poisoning or execution. Here is the War cemetery in the centre of Kanchanaburi. A great deal of Scottish soldiers are buried here, from the Gordon Highlanders, Argyll and Sutherland regiments alongside English, Welsh, and Dutch. Most were 20-30 years old. There are a lot of British and Dutch in Kanchanaburi visiting the various sites of remembrance. On Koh Lanta for example, we met a couple who had visited the cemetery to see the grave of an uncle who had died as a POW. I wonder how many more we saw today had a personal connection.
The railway is still in use today but the original rails have been replaced. You can still see the original structure in places such as this viaduct. Small gauge rails with 1943 stamped into them. Many men died here, from accidents, either by falling rock or drowning whilst building the railway. We went on a train along the Death Railway and every minute you are thinking about what went on here. You know the facts but we have absolutely no real concept of how horrific it must have been for these men. The whole time we were in the area of the River Kwai and the cemetery was incredibly sobering.
Despite the heinous acts committed by the Japanese Army in this area (using POWS as slave labour, poor nutrition and lack of medical care are all contraventions of the Geneva Convention) I am most surprised to see a great deal of Japanese tourists. I’m not sure about how I should feel about this. Particularly at the Bridge on the River Kwai itself there’s the usual Japanese malarkey of photographing one another a thousand times over, posing smiling in front of whatever landmark they are visiting. This poses a couple of questions for me.
- How is this war taught in Japanese schools- i.e what have these people been taught about the actions of the Japanese during this time?
- Am I being unreasonable to expect that Japanese people maybe don’t visit this site of the darkest part of their history?
- That aside, if we say that yes, the Japanese should visit these areas in the same way that German children are taught about the Holocaust in honest detail, should a little bit more decorum and respect be present?
Having spent a good deal of time in Germany I can never imagine German people to visit monuments to the Holocaust and be larking about, taking snaps in front of the “Arbeit Macht frei signs”. That just wouldn’t happen.
Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way anti Japanese. I hope one day to visit Japan, but it strikes me as odd that this be an area marketed to Japanese tourists. We have been in three other areas in Thailand and have seen next to no Japanese. Kanchanaburi is full of them. Do Americans visit Hiroshima? Is it long enough ago that we should move on? Am I being overly sensitive? After all these people are not responsible for the sins of the previous generation. They have as much to do with the actions of the Japanese Army as I do with British Imperialism and slave trading.
I don’t know, I can’t help thinking of the families who have placed messages and wreaths of remembrance for their fathers and grandfathers in Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, or of the few surviving POWS who return here for reasons of their own. How do they feel about a Karaoke barge full of singing middle aged Japanese tourists floating down the River Kwai belting out “Rawhide” in Japanese?
