The Short List: Kanchanaburi is located 130 km west of Bangkok on the elevated valley of the Mae Klong River. Muang Kan or Kan Buri or simply Kan as the local call it has a long border with Myanmar to the left. This land is full of caves with impressive stalactites and stalagmites and waterfalls. Its natural resources include delicious wild mushrooms and semi-precious stones. Kanchanaburi had long been a continual battlefield between the warring Siamese and Burmese before it acquired a strategic role in the WWII. Its Lak Muang Shrine is on Tanon Lak Muang and the original Kanchanaburi city gate is within the city shrine’s sight. The weather here is cooler than Bangkok and the street signs are in the fish-shaped ones representing plaa yisok, the fish that is most prevalent in Mae Klong River and its tributaries and therefore the most common local food.
Things Famous For:
- Death Railway Bridge spans 415km over the Khwae Yai river. The original bridge was made of wood; it was constructed in 16 months completing in February 1943 and caused 16,000 lives of POWs plus about 10,000 Asian workers. The second version was done in steel in April 1943. The Thai government bought the entire railway from the Allies for 50 million Baht and the Japanese replaced the three spans that were destroyed by bombers as war reparations. This days, the quiet little Death Railway runs from nowhere to nowhere.
- Allied War Cemeteries. There are two cemeteries containing the remains of Allied POWs who died in captivity during WWII: the Kanchanaburi Allied War Cemetery on Tanon Saengchutto and the other is Chung Kai Allied War Cemetery on Tanon Lak Muang.
- Hellfire Pass is a memorial trail project of the Australian-Thai Chamber of Commerce to honor the Allied POWs and Asian cohorts who lost their lives while constructing some of the most grueling 1,000m stretches of the Burma-Thailand Death Railway which was accomplished with minimum equipments of 3.5kg hammers, picks, shovels, steel tap drills, cane baskets for removing debris, and dynamite for blasting through solid rock. There are seven cuttings four smaller ones and three large ones spreading over 3.5km terrain. By the time the cuttings were finished, 70% of the POW crew had died and were buried in the Nearby Konyu Cemetery.
- Kanchanaburi province has seven waterfalls: Erawan, Pha-Lan, Trai Trung, Khao Pang, Sai Yok, PhaThat, and Huay Khamin- the most powerful waterfall in the province-all in the Northwest side of the province.
- Ban Kao Neolithic Museum is a small but well designed museum that displays the 3,000 to 4,000-year-old archeological findings of pottery, utensils and human skeletons from Ban Kao site which may have been inhibited the area about 10,000 years ago. Neolithic remains in the village of Ban Kao ware unrecovered by a Dutch POW named Van Heekeren during the construction of the Death Railway along the Khwae Noi river. After the WWII, a Thai-Dutch team retraced Van Heekeren’s discovery.
- Sangkhlaburi is a small Kanchanaburi outpost created after Khao Lam Dam was built and inhabited by mostly Karen, Mon, and a few Thais and a few Burmese. Thailand’s longest wooden bridge leads to a Mon settlement with a market in the village selling smuggled goods from Myanmar, China, and India.
- Thung Yai Naresuan National Park is Thailand’s largest protected land parcel of 3,200 sq km; one of the last natural habitats in Thailand for maybe 250 tigers. Best to go in with a local guide.
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