Falling for Erawan

With electric buggies to ferry you round the woods and waterfalls, getting back to nature is easy at Erawan National Park

Phoowadon Duangmee
The Nation

Everything goes down at a National Park, except for the entrance fees. More often than not, visitors are left stranded at the visitor centre without a ranger in sight – let alone a map to reach for. Bad goes to worse for the poor soul who has to brave the toilets. The pungent smell, and then the sight that greets you, are obvious signs that a hiker has passed this way, marking his territory with more than just a footprint.

Tales of misadventure in Thailand’s national parks have been an endless source of entertainment for visitors huddled around the campfire over the years. For anyone who has just returned from Erawan National Park however, the story might be different.

A 550-square-kilometre area of wooded mountains and valleys in Kanchanaburi province, Erawan National Park is only a three-hour drive away from Bangkok.

“We have been very successful in tackling the pollution problem,” says Surachai Ajalaboon, the chief ranger. “Cars, for example, are prohibited from rumbling through the park – drivers have to leave them at the carparks provided. This policy has been extremely successful in reducing noise and air pollution.”

Named after the triple-headed elephant Erawan, the mount of Indra in Hindu mythology, the area represents a kind of living museum, preserving the flora and fauna of a tropical rainforest. The centrepiece, however, is the Erawan Waterfall where seven cascades sweep down with a rush of white water over the course of two kilometres. No matter how many times you’ve been before, it’s always hard to resist stripping down to your shorts and plunging in.

“Erawan Waterfall is one of the best natural spots to swim,” says Surachai. “The crystal-clear water gushes in to hundreds of pools and there are no jagged rocks to worry about thanks to the limestone geology.”

The park gets more than 100,000 visitors each year, taking a dip or just enjoying the laid-back hike over the waterfall trail.

The park is “zoned”, with separate areas set aside for car parks, restaurants, accommodation and conservation, in order to manage the flow of visitors.

“Food is banned from the second cascade onwards to avoid the litter problem,” adds Surachai. “As other vehicles are prohibited, we provide electrically-powered golf carts for travel through the park.

Apparently, the cart preserves the environment as much as the tempers of visitors who don’t fancy walking the eight kilometres from the visitor centre to the waterfall.
Weekenders can pitch their tents at the campsite, where clean, modern toilets are just a stone’s throw away.

Alternatively, they can rest their weary heads at the riverside lodge, where accommodation starts at Bt800 per night. The lodge is well equipped, with standard single beds, a refrigerator (a real fridge – not a mini-bar) and a microwave oven, making it ideal for a family outing over the weekend.

“Visitors can make reservations for the lodge on the Internet before paying through an ATM machine,” says Surachai.

Whether it’s a relaxing hike over the five natural trails that wind around rainforest and waterfall or something more adventurous like mountain biking, kayaking or simply swimming, there are plenty of things to fill a weekend.

HOW TO GET THERE

At only 129 kilometres from Bangkok, Kanchanaburi is well served by Highway 4. From Bangkok, keep going westwards by first crossing either Phra Pinklao Bridge or Rama VIII Bridge and then following Borommaratchachonnani Road, or Road 338, which ultimately connects with Highway 4 (Phetchakasem Road) in Nakhon Chaisi. Turn right into Road 323 that runs via Ban Pong to the heart of Kanchanaburi’s Muang district. For the drive to the Erawan National Park, take Road 3199 and Road 323 for Sangkhla Buri district and the Three Pagodas Pass on the Thai-Burmese border.

WHERE TO STAY

Khao Laem National Park
Thong Pha Phum District
Tel: (034) 532 099
www.dnp.go.th
Price range: Bt900-Bt1,800

Great Lake Resort
Si Sawat District
Tel: (081) 845 8686, (081) 856 8539
www.GreatLakeResort.com
Price range: Bt1,300-Bt12,000

Kao Nam Na Resort
Sai Yok District
Tel: (034) 654 072, (086) 163 1139
www.KaoNamNaResort.com

Kring Kravia Resort
Sangkhla Buri District
Tel: (081) 816 2429, (034) 52 1553
Price range: Bt600-Bt3500

Soom Kasalong
Thong Pha Phum
Tel: (081) 294 9520, (089) 803 0450
Price range: Bt1800-Bt2,400

Baan Had Rim Khwae
Sai Yok
Tel: (089) 048 4970, (089) 057 6832
www.RiverKwai2.tripod.com
Price range: Bt1,000-Bt1,800

Ek Pailin River Khwae
Erawan-Lad Ya Road, Muang district
Tel: (034) 587 555, (02) 385 8858-9
www.AekPailinRiverKwai.com
Price range: Bt1,800-Bt10,000

Phorn Pailin Riverside
Sangkhla Buri
Tel: (034) 595 275, (034) 595 322
www.PPailin.com
Price range: Bt1,000-Bt3,000

WHERE TO EAT

The Resort Restaurant and Bar
Mae Nam Khawae Road, Muang district
Tel: (081) 847 9227

Nitaya River Khawe Terrace
Song Khwae Road, Muang
Tel: (081) 447 8767,(034)515 896

Santi
Behind Nam Tok Railway Station, Sai Yok
Tel: (034) 634 275, (081) 942 5419

Khiree Dhara
Mae Nam Khwae Road, Muang
Tel: (034) 624 093, (081) 847 9227

Sabai Jit
Sang Xuto Road, Muang
Tel: (034) 511 931

River Khwae
Mae Nam Khwae Road, Muang
Tel: (034) 512 540-1, (034) 624 221–2

Phae Arharn Rim Khwae
Rim Nam Na Muang Road, Muang
Tel: (034) 511 897

Ban Pa Rim Than
Lad Ya-Si Sawat Road (km 29)
Tel: (081) 213 3726, (081) 763 1601

Khrua Siang Phai
Sang Xuto Road, Muang
Tel: (034) 513 197

Of orchids and guns

Tom Vater
The Nation

The village of Ban Phra Chedi Sam Ong – which is attached to the Burmese frontier by a five-lane road – has a school, electricity and a sprawling market selling teak furniture, jade, orchids, cheroots and lots more from the other side of the border.

The market is clustered around three small pagodas, which give the border pass its name. Literally and metaphorically, this is the end of the road.

A convivial Thai customs officer tells me there’s a market on the other side, but beyond that nothing – no road, no way to proceed. A sign at the gateway reads, “Welcome all visitors, no video cameras!”

A few trucks and motorbikes cross back and forth. Burmese with painted faces, dressed in sarongs, scuttle about, looking dejected and harassed. Thai soldiers linger in the shade, their gleaming guns casually strapped across their shoulders.

The immigration officer launches into a favourite story.
“A few months ago the KNU [soldiers of the anti-Rangoon Karen National Union] came out of the hills and tried to kidnap the staff here.” He shrugs coolly and smiles.
“What happened?” I ask.

“They wanted to exchange us for some of their people who got caught in the area recently.”
“Was there any shooting?”
He shakes his head, no.

I’m left wondering what, if anything, really happened. Did the hardened guerrillas just march up here and demand that the Thai customs officials give up their guns and come with them? And why, then, did they just go away empty-handed?
The Burmese let in foreigners for a day at a time and only one kilometre beyond the border. At Burmese immigration, I’m accosted by a gang of motorcycle-taxi boys and arrange a lift to the nearest village, Payathonzu.

Life is different behind the bamboo curtain. The infrastructure is basic, the landscape seems wild, unmanaged, illusive. The hills are covered by disorderly fields, broken by brush and naked eroded earth.

Payathonzu market is a haphazard sprawl along the main road. Tough-looking men wearing the sarongs they call lungis sit in the shade smoking cheroots. Trucks are unloaded and children boil up palm oil and sweets.

“Orchid, orchid, you want beautiful orchid?” chant young girls. The plants they’re touting are more or less the same as on the Thai side.

Notable additions among the vast array of shops selling wooden furniture and knick-knacks, instruments and cheap jewellery are several stalls offering animal skulls – bears, monkeys, wild boar and the dried beaks of the rare giant hornbill. Huge vats filled with goats’ heads stand in the sun – the oil derived from the heads is said to have medicinal properties.

And of course, orchids are available everywhere.
As I sit talking to Win about his blooms, an old man approaches and shakes my hand emphatically. San Thein is from Mawlamyine, a town in Mon State. The dapper 68-year-old is on a pilgrimage.

“I’m getting old and I feel that this is my last journey. At home I mostly stay at our monastery now, Pha Auk Jawya, to assist the monks,” he says in fluent English. “But I wanted to see the chedis here. I will visit several monasteries before returning home.”

San Thein wants to travel to Bangkok and see the Emerald Buddha. “I was a school headmaster,” he continues. “I remember the British here in the ’40s, and then later the Japanese. I think it must have been 1942 when the Japanese turned up in my village and 50 soldiers moved into our house. We had to leave and moved into a shack in our paddy field. Then one day, news came that a hole had been blown into the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed – the Japanese were stunned. Some threw their weapons into the river, others fled. A few days later the British turned up and disarmed the rest. We moved back into our house.

“The abbot of Pha Auk Jawya wrote a speech for the UN, entitled ‘Eternal World Peace’. This is what we need. We need peace in Burma. But how to achieve it? Many nations are at war. Inside nations, people are at war.”

San Thein laughs disarmingly. “Even married couples are sometimes at war.”
The old man steps back into the sun to make way for a group of Thai orchid buyers. He shakes his head at the market bustle and waves. “I hope to see you in Bangkok. Let’s meet to see the Emerald Buddha.” And he’s gone.

In the shadow of the Three Pagodas

Too quiet to truly be the ‘wild west’, the outposts on the Burma frontier trade in orchids, teak and stories of rebels with guns

Tom Vater
The Nation
SANGKHLA BURI

Win sells orchids. “We go into the jungle and get them by the sack-full. It takes a long time these days, so I sometimes get kids to do it. I pay them between Bt100 and Bt300 a sack depending on what species they get.”

Win sits in a small hut surrounded by a dozen different species of beautiful epiphytes. The fence out front, draped with hundreds more orchids, divides Thailand and Burma.
Different countries, different worlds.

Thai tourists crowd the makeshift shops and buy bags of flowers. The sellers, mostly young Burmese girls with their faces covered in yellow paste, are armed with books of orchid photos and know their rare species from the common ones.
The prices are low. Single flowers cost anywhere from Bt20 to Bt200.

The hustle and bustle of central Thailand yields to a more languid quiet beyond Kanchanaburi. After Nam Tok, the modern terminus of World War II’s “Death Railway”, rolling hills give way to limestone mountains and the Khao Laem Reservoir, dotted with the floating houses of fishermen.

During the dry season, the hillsides are set afire, which makes for hazy views, but at night the burning patches of land are visible from far off, giving the entire province an otherworldly remoteness.

The border town of Sangkhlaburi looks a little like it belongs in the American Wild West, but the surrounding hills and the lake are utterly serene.

A few backpackers mingle each afternoon with the crowds of Burmese, Karen, Mon and Thais.

From a pair of wooden bridges spanning a reservoir local Mon teenagers show off with dives, while below, villagers tend their raft gardens.

Armin, the Austrian owner of the Burmese Inn’s guesthouse bungalows on the reservoir, has been in town for 15 years and remembers the bad old days of cross-border tension.

“There has been no fighting around Sangkhlaburi and the Three Pagodas Pass since 1995. I remember the last time Karen rebels and Burmese troops exchanged mortar fire across the border. Some landed around here, close to the lake.

“Now the Karen appear to be signing some kind of cease-fire deal. What can they do against a standing army of 450,000 soldiers and 30,000 secret police? Burma is incredibly repressive and brutal. The ethnic minorities don’t stand a chance of achieving autonomy by military means.”

Hence the area remains in an economic limbo – peaceful but not quite at peace.
A surfaced road leads through unruly brush and rocky hills to the border, which is closed to foreigners – almost.

Several roadblocks manned by Thai soldiers keep a lid on the smuggling of timber and drugs.

The soldiers look bored but friendly. There is no other traffic. Twice my vehicle almost flattens long black snakes that sun themselves on the hot tarmac.

The living Death Railway

Drawings by Pows and the remains of rails and rusting locomotives in Kanchanaburi and Ranong recall a horrific chapter in World War II

Oliver Hargreave
Special to The Nation

Imagine you are weak, weary and dispirited, but desperate to avoid a severe, life-threatening beating. How long could you hold a heavy rock above your head?
The image of a prisoner of war doing just that as a punishment meted out by Japanese guards for not working hard enough is one of Jack Chalker’s stark drawings of life on the Death Railway in Kanchanaburi during World War II.

This prisoner and other slave labourers would likely be surprised if they could look into the future and learn that, in less than 50 years, much of the railway would become defunct. Some parts have returned to the wild, and some are now a tourist attraction.

Construction of the 415-kilometre line began in June 1942 and ended when the lines from Thanbyuzayat in Burma and Nong Pladuk, via Kanchanaburi, met at Konkuita on October 17, 1943. Konkuita is now under the lake formed by Khao Laem Dam.

Taking a train as far as Nam Tok may seem straightforward enough today, but reopening the line after the war was not. The allies had closed the railway before selling it back to the Thai government for ฃ1.25 million in 1947. That sum bought Japanese locomotives, bridges and what remained of the rail bed.

The line was in such poor condition that less than a third, 130 kilometres, was reopened. The first section, from Nong Pladuk to Kanchanaburi, was not ready until 1949. It wasn’t until 1958 that the third and final section of the line, from Wang Pho (where the famous trestle still carries the line above the banks of the Khwae Noi) to Nam Tok, was reopened.

Thirty-six kilometres west of the terminus at Nam Tok is the Konyu Cutting. This is where Pows worked day and night to make a cut for the line. The haunting image of prisoners working by the light of flames gave Hellfire Pass its name.

A steep path up a hill links the cutting with the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum, located close to Highway 323 near Kilometre 46. The museum contains memorabilia and paintings by prisoners who worked on the line. The paintings include a few by Chalker, as well as by Ronald Searle who was to become a prominent political cartoonist in Britain.

The Konyu Cutting itself is the start of a 4.5-kilometre memorial walk which follows the old rail line west to Compressor Cutting. Signboards give explanations of such landmarks as the “pack of cards bridge”. To go on the walk without a large bottle of water isn’t advisable, although it gives some insight into the privations the Pows had to face.

Another sombre memorial lies further west. At Kilometre 61 on Highway 323, a narrow lane descends to the Home Phu Toey Resort. Located at a particularly picturesque spot in the Khwae Noi Valley, the resort also has a memorial park honouring Weary Dunlop, the Australian doctor who helped many other Pows survive the ordeal.

Next to the park is a gallery which houses a comprehensive collection of Chalker’s drawings. Many depict how Dunlop and his team improvised facilities to fight the horrific tropical ulcers and other maladies that plagued prisoners.

A long, careful look at these images will deeply impress viewers. Few photographs recorded the conditions on the railway at that time, so the artwork by the POWs bears witness to the horror of its construction.

More than 90,000 Asian conscripts and more than 18,000 Allied Pows died building the line.

Near the gallery is a section of reconstructed track complete with an old steam locomotive and rolling stock.

Other engines commemorating the line can be found at Kanchanaburi, but these are not the only locomotives to commemorate a death railway in Thailand.

Fast facts

The Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum is near Kilometre 46. Run by the Office of Australian War Graves, the museum is open daily (9 am to 4 pm) and is free of charge. The Home Phu Toey Resort welcomes visitors who call in advance (call Khun Achara at 01 880 8971) if they want to see Jack Chalker’s drawings.

Websites www.travelmallasia.com provides a description of the resort and www.hotel-thailand.com offers special rates for Internet users. For more information, call Home Phu Toey Co Ltd (02) 621 1510-3.