As I grew up, I was aware that my father had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Thailand, and that he had been forced to work on what was known as the "Death Railway". He had been permanently weakened by the experience, had lost a lung during a shipwreck, but it was never really spoken about in our family. He died when I was a child, and as I got older I wanted to know more about what had happened to him.

I first went to Kanchanaburi in 1988 with my mother. We visited the bridge on the river Kwai and stayed in a tiny hut right on the river (the inspiration for the place where Laura and Luke stay in the book). You can see the photos from that trip here.

Kanchanaburi was not very developed in 1988. The only museum that was there then was the ​JEATH Museum.   It was in a group of atap huts, similar to the ones the prisoners would have lived in while building the railway. It was fairly low key then and run by a Buddhist monk. It was slightly bizarre, with cartoons of the various tortures meted out to prisoners displayed in graphic detail. We visited that museum, walked over the Bridge on the River Kwai and took a train along the railway to the end of the line at Nam Tok near the Burmese border.  At that time, no section of the railway had been restored for visitors to walk on.

I went again in 2005 with my husband and our three sons who were then aged 8, 11, and 13. We went back to the JEATH museum, which had hardly changed since my first visit, and by that time there was also the excellent Thailand, Burma Railway centre, with information and displays about the railway together with walk-in railway carriages and 3D reconstructions of parts of the track.

We also took a trip up the railway line and walked a section of the railway, between Hellfire Pass, through Hintok and to Compressor Cutting. This section of the track has been restored by the Australian Government, and there is a museum and walking trail dedicated to the POWs and Asian labourers who died building it.  

​Hellfire Pass is a 500 metres long and 26 metres deep section of rock that was dug out by Prisoners of War intended to allow the ‘Death Railway’ to continue its route from Bangkok to Rangoon. Soldiers were forced to remove the rock using no more than picks, hammers and their bare hands. Of the 1,000 Australian and British prisoners who took 12 weeks to clear the stretch of mountain, 700 died.