Your ultimate guide to Kanchanaburi and the River Kwai Bridge Week Festival

Kanchanaburi commemorates WW2 with its annual son et lumière, the River Kwai Bridge Festival. This year’s festival will be held over 11 nights, beginning on November 27, with a light and sound show, and concluding on December 7. It should be noted that on December 4 and 5, the light and sound show will be cancelled as the steam locomotive used in the show is unavailable. 

The festival will run at two main locations – around the River Kwai Bridge where a nightly re-enactment takes place and the area beside the Provincial Administrative Organisation. Planned festivities include food stalls, Thai Red Cross booths, a floral parade, an international market and two pageants: Little Miss Kanchanaburi and Miss Peace Kanchanaburi. 

According to the festival organisers, 2025’s theme, The Light of Remembrance and Eternal Loyalty, reflects the love, respect and gratitude Thai people hold for Her Majesty Queen Sirikit, The Queen Mother, as the province joins the nation in mourning. 

Myth and reality blend like the waters of the Kwai Noi and Kwai Yai in Kanchanaburi.

The Death Railway – or what remains of the 415km Siam-Burma Railroad built under the auspices of Imperial Japan – is, of course, real. Built between 1940 and 1943 by captured Allied soldiers and Southeast Asians, an estimated 12,000 soldiers and 90,000 civilians died driving an iron road through thick jungle and hill country in appalling monsoon conditions. 

It was French author Pierre Boulle who brought this episode of history to global consciousness with his 1952 novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï, which was made into a motion picture in 1957 starring Alec Guinness. The Bridge on the River Kwai was partly based on some of Boulle’s war experiences, as he’d worked as special agent in Southeast Asia before being captured on the Mekong. However, the plot and characters are fictional, prompting some Death Railway survivors to take exception to it. 

Massive box office success, however, spurred Kanchanaburi to accommodate pilgrims seeking the real-life setting behind the movie, which had been filmed in Sri Lanka. Authorities dutifully renamed the section Makaleng River that washes through the city ‘Kwai Yai’ or Big Kwai where it joins the Kwai Noi (Little Kwai), so as to make sure there was actually a trestle bridge that crossed the river of the film’s namesake. 

Other bestselling memoirs and novels have followed, notably Eric Lomax’s biography The Railway Man (1995), which was made into a film in 2013 and Richard Flanagan’s Booker prize-winning novel Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was recently developed into a five-part television drama of critical acclaim. 

Yet while cinema has kept the Death Railway relevant, and commerce plays its part, there is much that is authentic to see in Kanchanaburi. A walk through the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery is a soberingly pensive experience, the folly of war writ large in the names engraved in each neatly tended gravestone. The cemetery is overlooked by the Thailand-Burma Railway Centre, which provides detailed, sometimes shocking accounts of those who lived and died laying the tracks. 

No trip to Kanchanaburi would be complete without a visit to Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre. Built and maintained by the Australian government, the interpretive centre sits amidst the Tenasserim Hills, an 80km drive from Kanchanaburi, at a particularly difficult section of the line. The 75m-long Konyu Cutting had to be blown out of the rocky hillside, often at night, which is how it earned its hellish moniker. 

Although this section is no longer in use as a railway, it has been turned into two memorial walks, a 1km roundtrip and a longer 5km hike as far as Hintok Cutting. Headphones are available, which provide moving commentary from the prisoners of war who laboured on the pass. You’ll need water and sunscreen if you embark on the longer hike.   

You can get a songthaew there from Nam Tok Station (B500 one way/B800 return), usually including a stop at Sai Yok Noi Waterfall en route. 

Alternatively, there are buses from Kanchanaburi Bus Station leaving hourly from 8am onwards.

Two trains leave daily from Thonburi Station along what is officially known as the Kanchanaburi Line. The Ordinary 257 departs at 7.45am, and the Ordinary 259 departs at 1.55pm. The route follows the Southern Line until Nong Pla Duk Junction from where you’re on the Death Railway, which stretches as far as Nam Tok, 130km to the west. It is possible to do the trip in a day, returning in the afternoon, although most opt to stay overnight. 

Tickets cost B100 one way but cannot be purchased online or in advance so you’ll have to arrive at the station at least 30 minutes prior to departure to purchase tickets at the ticket office. Prepare for high demand during the River Kwai Bridge Festival period. 

Alternatively, minibuses leave at regular intervals from the Southern Terminal and Mochit New Van Terminal, taking around three hours to get to Kanchanaburi.