Wandergliding: The JEATH War Museum & a Thai Massage

October 22^nd, 2024

After a full day yesterday, I purposefully planned a slower day for today. I wanted to check out the small JEATH War Museum by the bridge and perhaps get my first massage in Thailand…no, not the “Happy Ending” type either, a proper massage for my sore back.

JEATH stands for the primary nationalities involved in building the Death Railway: “Japanese, English, Australian & American, Thai and Holland” (sure, they dropped one A but we’ll let that ride). The entrance fee was 50 baht ($2) and that might have been overpriced. It was a dilapidated museum that was first founded in 1977, and I’m not sure if any upkeep or improvements have been done since then.

A rusted Japanese locomotive from WWII:

I don’t know if it used to be a natural history museum at one point as one of the first rooms contained old artifacts such as clay bowls and rudimentary tools, along with some strange murals…look at this for instance:

A model of the Bridge Over the River Kwai...that I might have been able to make in grade 8.

Cool old bicycle:

The mannequins looked a bit scary...they did look emaciated, I'll give them that.

A makeshift field hospital:

Large cooking pots that are about 4 feet in diameter:

A Japanese jeep:

If only I could rock a moustache...

Japanese helmets:

A mural depicting the Allies bombing the bridge:

Some old tools, railway spikes and a pistol:

Twenty minutes or so later, I was done. Oh well, it had to be checked out.

I walked about a kilometre down the main road by my guesthouse in search of a massage place that offered “Back & Neck”, which was actually harder to find than expected. Foot massages are the most common ones offered. I found a place and the two ladies must have been bored as I was the only customer even though there were about 8-10 beds (it’s still low season for tourists, until next month). I had the options of 30 minutes, one hour or two hours. I opted for one hour for 400 baht ($16) but tried to joke with the masseuse that I wasn’t sure I’d last that long. I had been warned that Thai massages were borderline painful in how these ladies dug their elbows into you.

On my search I noticed this beauty salon...or is it a "beer-ty salon"?!?

After removing my clothes in a backroom and putting on these funny dark green shorts that a sumo wrestler could fit into (luckily it had a drawstring to tie it up), I was instructed to lie face down on a massage table. Unfortunately, they don’t have proper massage tables where your face pokes through a hole so that your neck is straight. Instead, my forehead was on a pillow as I tried to give my nose some space from the mattress, but it definitely got crushed during the first half of the treatment. As the lady crawled on top of me, it felt like my jaw was going to dislocate. I wasn’t sure if I was really enjoying this or not. She did get my back to crack occasionally which did feel relieving. Later on, she did do some contortions with my legs that also stretched me in some interesting, but good ways.

The first half of the massage seemed to go on forever, but then I was surprised when she stated that the time was up and sure enough, an hour had passed by. As I was leaving, Leah found out that I was from Canada and she curled her hand around my arm and asked me to take her with me…umm, sorry but no. She had made my back feel better though as it had been getting a bit sore over the last few days, thanks to some hard mattresses, which seems to be the norm in this country.

I survived my first Thai massage…that deserves a beer! My last item on the agenda was to watch the train that I took the day before cross the bridge, it was time to be the spectator not the participant.