Man with the golden aim
OUTSIDE A Kanchanaburi cave - next to a picture of Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej, offerings of rice and whisky, fragrant floral garlands, smouldering incense and a mysterious coconut with a face painted on one end - sit two books. One is green. One is red.
If you sign the red book, it means you think Thailand's answer to Indiana Jones, Senator Chaowarin Latthasaksiri, is a dreamer, a madman, a time-waster and a fraud. If you sign the green, it means you share his belief that 2,500 tonnes of gold sit in a rusting wartime train carriage, entombed by rubble, tantalisingly out of reach. Thus far, five people have signed the red book. I'm tempted to become the sixth, but with the senator and his team of gun-toting police and army types milling about nearby, I decide it's probably wiser to add my name to the tally of true believers, which at 12.35pm on Saturday, April 14, stands at 1,115.
It's a measure of how badly the Thai people want to share Chaowarin's unswerving belief that the legend of Lijia Cave is true: that defeated Japanese soldiers under the command of a sadistic major loaded the cave with enough plundered gold to pay off Thailand's considerable national debt, sealed themselves inside with the loot and then blew the place sky-high.
The cave, about 50 kilometres from the hamlet of Sangkhla Buri and a stone's throw from the infamous bridge on the River Kwai, is doubtless the ideal location for a treasure hunt. It bares its stalactite teeth in a come-hither grin, in the shadows of a sheer limestone cliff which rears up, past vertical, about 150 metres. Claw your way up a jerry-built bamboo ladder, slither over a carpet of moss, mud and bat guano, and you're welcomed with a blast of musty breath. Inside, the cave drops away by up to 50 metres in places and extends back at least 200 metres. Forestry Department officers now surveying it report perilous pockets of bad air and chill subterranean streams.
The nearby Khaolaem Dam covers what was a major Japanese staging post in the region. In one of its myriad emerald inlets, you can see the parallel furrows of the Thai-Burma 'death railway', its rails and timber long since plundered by villagers for steel and firewood. The tracks, which once wound about the humps and coils of the Sangkhla Buri hills, now lead straight into the dam and its eerie, submerged forest.
Locals give Lijia Cave a wide berth, and not just because the area is crawling with king cobras. They say there's just too much bad ju-ju.