Sleeper trains

It has taken me two days to get from Penang to Chiang Mai. I took a ferry from Penang to Butterworth and took the IE36 train to Bangkok. On the train were backpackers, Malays and Thais. The backpackers were the loudest bunch, talking about the places they have been to, the food they have eaten and the things they have done like diving and surfing. One British couple had a huge surf board with them. They were told that they could take it onto the train without any extra fee at Butterworth, but once we passed the Thai border, they were asked to place the surf board in an unsecured hole and pay an extra 150 baht fee for the board. They were issued a receipt for the money.

For most of the 22 hour trip from Butterworth to Bangkok, we sat on the train seats. But the seats were transformed into surprisingly comfortable beds by the train attendant. It was a whole load of fun, but bumps and rocking of the train, does make it more difficult to get a full nights rest.


Hualamphong Train Station

I got into Bangkok at 11.30 and went immediately to buy my train ticket for Chiang Mai. The train left at 6.10 pm and I had about 6 hours to kill. I went to an internet cafe next to the station to book my hotel in Chiang Mai and check up on email. The owner of the internet cafe asked me where I was from and when I said Singapore, he said it was a great city. And I smiled. And as he said, 'You want to live in Thailand?', two truck loads of red shirt protesters drove past the shop. 'No, I guess I would not want to be living in a place of civil unrest.'


Hualamphong Train Station

After squatting for a few hours more at the Black Canyon cafe in Hualamphong train station, I got onto the special express train 1 for Chiang Mai. This time I had a Thai artist sitting opposite me. His name is Meng Kai. He was furiously doodling on any surface that had space for him to draw on. He told me that he knows a Singaporean artist living in Bangkok, Joseph Ng. The world seems small. We talked about pop art, Japan and architecture. He does not like Frank Gehry but prefers the simple lines of Endo.

Next to us is traveling a family of a Thai woman with American accented son and daughter. Her traveling companion was a bald headed Sri Lankan gentleman that engaged in conversation with Meng Kai and I by calling us brother.



On these long train rides, the landscape changes, some times rice fields, sometimes palm trees, sometimes, coming close to Chiang Mai, a sparse forest reminding me of the title of a book I read years ago, the Stik of Stik. And whether in small towns or big cities, what is obvious is humanity, unglossed, stoic, living in spite of the circumstance.

For me I am traveling in spite of myself. I had a mild cold just before I left Singapore and a remnant cough continued to follow me to Chiang Mai. More disturbing is that I must have eaten something bad in Penang, and my stomach has been gradually getting more upset. I thought that if I just let it be it would resolve itself. But it has not.

So I got into Chiang early this morning, at 7.45 am and checked into my hotel. I have spent the day in bed eating the medicine my father bought for me in Singapore. Fortunately, I took this opportunity to finish off the book, 'A Fortune-Teller Told Me' by Tiziano Terzani. I had already read 'The Great Train Bazaar' by Paul Theoroux before I left Singapore and although an easy read, I found it a little dry. Terzani's book was much more of a personal journey, insightful into the politics and nature of the places he visited.

I hope that I will be in shape to take the boat ride to Lao Prabang in three days time.