Word: burma
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Jungle vines long ago began to reclaim the railway leading to the famous bridge on the River Kwai that the Japanese brutally built with Allied POWs and Asian laborers during World War II. Today the Burma-to-Thailand railway, whose bridge inspired a book and movie, is patronized mostly by Westerners visiting the graves of soldiers who worked on it. Hoping to tap such tourism, Thai entrepreneurs propose a $38.5 million reconstruction to turn the decaying area into an amusement park. Survivors of the bloody trail are not amused, however, and compare the idea to refurbishing Auschwitz as a Disneyland...
WHEN I FIRST SAW VOLCANO SUNS three years ago, they were a nascent three-piece outfit featuring drummer Peter Prescott, formerly of Mission of Burma. At the time, they were playing with the wretched Ben Vaughan Combo, opening up for a Violent Femmes show. The trio's songs were rough, half-improvised ditties with common foods like popcorn and margarine being the typical subject matter. It's no wonder I did not think much of them...
...Mandalay. Burmese trains are kind of like riding a horse all night, only you're in a chair. In Mandalay, even the Jeeps disappeared, and the streets were empty except for horse-carts and rickshaws. We took a horse-cart out to Sagaing, "the spiritual center of Buddhism in Burma," where about 500 monasteries surround a pagoda on a hill. We were escorted up the hill by a group of uniformed school kids entranced by Tom's sunglasses (every little kid we met on the trip, in the smallest, remotest villages, yelled "Rambo!" when he caught a look...
...night the boat stopped in Pakkoku. Tourist Burma had told us we had to sleep on board, but that turned out to be another official lie. We guessed that since Pakkoku wasn't on any of our maps, it must be a tiny village; it turned out to be a city of 200,000. We stayed at a family inn called the Myayatanar, where innkeeper Tint San spoke impeccable English and his son played "Ob-la-di, ob-la-da" on the guitar. They took us into town to the festival that was going on that night. We expected another...
...last sight I remember on leaving Burma is 2,000 dots on the landscape as the plane rose out of Pagan, good old Burma Air. I'd only changed $15 with Tourist Burma, but I had three bags of Burmese lacquerware and a full-size traditional puppet, and I don't know where I lost all my tapes and T-shirts. Must have been those crazy Burmese--an especially tricky people...