arrived in chiang-mai!

i have officially lost track of where we are in the itinerary, but no matter, i have just had absolutely delicious vietnamese stuffed peppers with ginger sauce for lunch, followed by what might possibly be my new favourite flavour of icecream, coconut & custard apple. the custard apple is a new fruit for me this trip, but i have become a fan. not the easiest thing to eat, but a nice sort of nutty, pearish flavour.
alors. yesterday morning we drove up to hellfire pass, which was yet another stop on the burma-thailand railway where conditions at the POW workcamps were absolutely horrific and mountains of Allied prisoners and native labourers died of starvation, cholera, and general shitty treatment at the hands of the Japanese soldiers, and while, again, a lot of the testimonials in the little museum and along the guided walk thing there are very moving, i once again came away with the sense of incompleteness to the story.
first of all, the emphasis is very much on the allied soldiers rather than the native labourers (who were initially recruited with promises of reasonable pay, and then pressganged into staying once they got there), and yet vastly, hugely more of the native labourers died (nearly half of them, about 90,000) compared to the 8,000 allied POWs who died. add to the fact that the allied POWs were, after all, soldiers who had been trying to kill the japanese and therefore in some tiny sense knew the risks of poor treatment were they to be captured, vs the native labourers who were all civilians of a country that really hadn't wanted to be part of the war to begin with, and you start to think, well, hang on, shouldn't the emphasis of the museums and memorials etc be on the thai natives who died? unless the english and thai captions at the museum don't say the same thing... the other things that i felt were not really addressed were a) the fact that most of the places that Japan was considered horrible for trying to invade were colonies of the US and European countries, and there isn't really any attempt to explain why it was wrong for Japan to be seizing control whereas it was totally fine for the US and Europe to have seized control of Malaysia, the Philippines, Hawaii, etc. etc. 50-100 years prior. also b) they didn't really discuss what things were like for the Japanese soldiers - i.e. were conditions horrible for them, too, because _everyone_ was at the end of a scanty supply line out in the heat/disease of the jungle? or were they living large in air-con mansions eating sushi and sake for dinner every night? i would be quite interested to know.
i was reading an article in the new yorker about the use of unmanned drones, and the estimated death tolls of iraqi and afghan civilians at this point far outnumber the tally of Americans killed on 9/11, to say nothing of the much larger percentage of children killed in Iraq/Afghanistan compared to the World Trade Centers, and yet we're still supposed to believe that we're the good guys why exactly??
anyway. running out of time here - in the afternoon we went to atutthaya which i can't remember how to spell - the capital of thailand until 1760-something, to bicycle around the old ruins, which was totally, totally, totally gorgeous. after that dinner on an old rice-barge as it cruised down the river with views of the ruins lit up at night (spectacular), and karoake (terrible) and then the night train to chiang mai, which was a little bit of a crisis point for me in terms of, er, cultural differences between me and the rest of the tour group. the train was two hours late, and everyone else proceeded to spend that time getting absolutely shitfaced (about a dozen beers and four bottles, yes bottles, of thai rum between six of them), so that they could then spend the overnight train journey shouting, singing, and propositioning danish tourists in the sleeper berths next door. eesh. okay have to run!