Hellfire Pass

After our visit to the elephants we had lunch and then headed off to Hellfire Pass. This is a place where the prisoners of war had to manually cut through the mountainside to lay down the railway track. Nowadays it is a beautiful museum, with information well laid out and a short video describes events that happen. There are not many exhibits as most of what the men had rotted away in the humidity of the jungle. 

Hopefully you can enlarge these pictures to read them. With more and more prisoners dying or becoming too weak to work, work fell behind on the railway, so the Japanese employed romusha, who were Asian labourers  to help. The Romusha were promised high wages and good conditions, some even took their families with them but in reality they were treated worse than the prisoners and thousands of them also died.

At the museum you can get a free audio guide and walk along part of the railway and through Hellfire Pass. It was called Hellfire Pass by the prisoners who had to work through the night to get it done, to do this it was lit up with torches which they said looked like the fires of hell. 

Nowadays it is very beautiful, calm and very atmospheric. As you walk along listening to the audio guide you get a real feel of what the situation must have been like, especially in the sweltering heat and mosquitoes flying around. We felt the heat just wandering the route, without doing any physical work, we had cold water with us, sun hats to shade us and could stop when we wanted to. 

This is right in the pass, as walked this bit the audio guide was explaining the ceremony that is held here on ANZAC day every year. Family and friends walk though the pass at night carrying torches to the memorial place at the end, as they do so bagpipes and a bugle play from lookout spots above the pass. At that, on the tape the bagpipes started playing, was quite moving to hear. 

A broken drill bit still in the rock. A hole would be made and dynamite placed in to blast the rock which would then be carried out by the men. Many men were injured during this process and their wounds would become ulcerated and infected in the damp, hot weather.

If the men were lucky they had these carts to help them shift the rock, if  not they had to carry them by hand. 

The stone at the memorial spot.

We carried on after the memorial spot and did some more of the route, sadly we did not have time to complete it all as we had to join up with our tour group. 

If you look closely you can see a snake on the rock, it slithered over the path in front of us. 

A view from one of the points on the route. At this point on the audio guide, there was an ex prisoner telling his story and he said that he loved the beauty of the place and it was that, that had got him through the experience.

There were many ex prisoners recounting their experiences and most of them told a humorous story of what had happened while they had been there. It was basically the comradeship between the men that helped the men who survived. A great deal of respect was shown towards the doctors who often took a beating for standing up for the patients by saying they were too ill to work. 

Hellfire Pass from above.

A railway carriage from World War II

We really enjoyed our visit here and would like to visit it again to do the whole walk.