Phu Toei

March 31, 2019

We were at the Hellfire Pass Interpretive Center by eight o'clock this morning having cycled down there straight after breakfast. The center only opens at nine so we spent the next hour birding in the area. We had already had nice sightings of Vernal Hanging Parrots on the way down from our digs.

The center and the cleared stretch of line, sans tracks, was developed and sponsored by the Australian government in the mid 1980s. The center itself is very good and shows the Death Railway from an Aussie perspective.

The main focus of restoration is Hellfire Pass itself, a 75 meter cutting through the a part of the Tenasserim Hills. The following paragraph is a series of snippets from the Wikipedia entry on the pass.

Hellfire Pass is so called because the sight of emaciated prisoners labouring at night by torchlight was said to resemble a scene from Hell. It was the largest rock cutting on the railway, coupled with its general remoteness and the lack of proper construction tools during building. A tunnel would have been possible to build instead of a cutting, but this could only be constructed at the two ends at any one time, whereas the cutting could be constructed at all points simultaneously despite the excess effort required by the POWs. The Australian, British, Dutch and other allied Prisoners of War were required by the Japanese to work 18 hours a day to complete the cutting. Sixty-nine men were beaten to death by Japanese guards in the six weeks it took to build the cutting, and many more died from cholera, dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion . However, the majority of deaths occurred amongst labourers (mostly Chinese, Malays and Tamils from Malaya) whom the Japanese enticed to come to help build the line with false promises of good jobs.

Hellfire Pass or Konyu Cutting (the name used by the Japanese)

The Hellfire Pass section is what most tourists seem to visit but it is possible to walk along the cleared line for another three kilometers, which is what we did. It is a tough walk in the heat but our slight discomfort pails in comparison with what the PoWs and forced labourers must have endured.

A broken drill or tap in the rock. The technique used to blast the rock away was to drill holes manually with a team of two men - one holding the tap and the other striking it until they had made a hole large enough in which to insert dynamite.

The audio track with which we were provided gave lots of intersting information. One of the survivors noted that of the few pleasures they had, one was to look out over the immense teak forests below the railway. On his return in the 1980s they were all gone and now what remains a a scrubby woodland.

There were many more cuttings than just Hellfire Pass. This is Hin Tok Cutting, just past what had been a three-tier wooden bridge spanning about eighty meters. The bridge fell down three times during the construction and was called The Pack of Cards Bridge by the PoWs.

The target bird for me at Hellfire Pass was Limestone Wren-Babbler, a rather nondescript little bird of which I managed a couple of brief views.

Today's ride: 7 km (4 miles)
Total: 1,569 km (974 miles)

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