The journey was an adventure. At the top of the railway, we boarded trucks, that rocked and staggered down a steep kilometre to the river bank. Here we got into two of the new, fast boats and, for a couple of cacophonic hours, raced upstream to a place called Nam Noi – a small stream said to hold huge fish and to go as far as Burma. Here, porters met us to carry our baggage to the farm, while we climbed into a high, heavy truck with loose, wooden benches arranged in it, then went off down an elephant path through virgin bamboo forest on a breakneck journey of eleven kilometres that took us a good stomach-shattering hour, despite a demonically inspired driver.

I asked Yup if, at some point, we crossed the old railway line.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ But when he pointed it out, it was as though the forest held just the ghost of an ancient tunnel running through it, a hint of what might have been the line.

The farm itself was cleared virgin forest planted out with coconut palms, tobacco, sesame, black beans and other crops. It had an air of pioneer organisation and enthusiasm.

‘What did our railway mean to you?’ I asked Yup.

‘A great deal,’ he replied. ‘And not only to me. To people all the way up here. You saw the agriculture strip development each side of the line? This railway of yours has been a very beneficial thing to this part of Thailand.’

‘What about the price we paid? Maybe sixteen thousand POWs dead, plus untold tens of thousands of Asian labourers indentured by the Japanese? Probably all together, well over a hundred thousand lives were lost here.’

‘Asians feel that you Western people place far too much value on human life,’ Yup replied. ‘When the Chinese fought the Japanese, a hundred thousand could be killed in one big battle.’

It reminded me of the distinct disadvantage felt during the battle of Singapore which my unfortunate 18th Division knew was as good as lost by the time we arrived there. Unless a European is a fanatical believer in some principle, or a convinced ‘next-world’ Christian, he values and shields his life. To the Japanese, death was simply an escape to a more noble reincarnation in which he could fight for the Emperor again. To a Chinese, life has for generations been tragically cheap.

But Yup and his farm will have by no means the last word on our river. There are two great government plans for major dam projects. Much of this beautiful river, in a few years’ time, will become a long irrigation lake. Parts of it we were possibly seeing for the last time.