We started the day with a buffet breakfast on the river in the same place we had dinner the night before, and then we board the coach to start our long drive to Sangkhlaburi.
On the way we stopped at Hellfire Pass Museum where an extremely difficult passage of the Death Railway is located. The Death Railway was built by forced labor from allied POW's in WWII to supply the Japanese forces in Burma. 200,000 Asians and around 60,000 POW's consisting of Australians, British, and Dutch built this 415km (257mile) railway across Thailand to Burma. Hellfire pass was the largest rock cutting on the railway, and due to the harsh conditions and Japanese retaliation over half of the Australian POW's and many others died trying to build this pass. The museum was built by the Australian government to remember the men and women who lost their lives along this railway. We were able to tour the museum and walk along Hellfire Pass which was a lot longer and bigger than we had imagined. We saw the old train track and there was a memorial at the very end with Australian flags all over.
After our time at the museum we were back on the bus and we started driving through the thick jungle towards Sangkhlaburi. The scenery was gorgeous, bright green jungle everywhere you looked, and there were mountains that looked just like the islands that we had gone to before the medical mission. We passed a bunch of rivers and lakes with houses built right on top of them with stilts. All of them in the middle of nowhere, we were about three hours away from the city of Kanchanaburi at this point.
After about five hours we had made it to Sangkhlaburi and we checked into our hotel that would be our home base for the rest of the trip. We had another welcome dinner at a local restaurant right around the corner from the hotel, where we would eat at many times during the brigade. We got to meet the rest of our Starfish team, some of which were born and raised in Sangkhlaburi. They gave us a tour of the town, the local street market, the 7-11, massage parlor, and some coffee shops and restaurants. Can I just mention the massages are approximately $8 for an hour long massage! The town consists of only a couple of streets and it is shaped like a square with the main market located right in the middle. We walked by the school and saw some of the kids on the field playing soccer. The entire town center can be walked around in less than ten minutes, so you can imagine how small and quaint it is, no street lights or even stop signs here. You might have imagined this town to be fairly quiet, but in fact it is kind of loud. Everyone drives motorcycles or scooters so those can get a little loud. However, it was still a lot more peaceful than the craziness of Bangkok.
For dinner we were picked up in trucks converted to taxis with built in benched in the back called Samn Tow meaning "two rows." We had dinner at a really nice restaurant located on the river. It was decorated with tons of lights and we had traditional family style Thai food, fried chickedm, steamed veggies, coconut chicken soup, sweat and sour shrimp, and of course rice.
It was off to bed after that for a good night sleep to get ready for our first clinic the next morning. We were all so excited it was hard to sleep!
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