The Chiang Mai to Bangkok night
train takes almost 15 hours. It is a distance of approximately 425 miles, so
this is a pretty slow train. First class private carriages were booked, so we
had to slum it with the masses in second class. It’s not a surprise that first
class tickets sell out swiftly, as they are only about £15.00.
The sleeper train experience
summed up in bullet points:
- · The seats fold down to make beds
- · Cold, dreadful, dreadful food.
- · The toilet is basically a hole – you’re excreting right onto the tracks as you ‘speed’ over them.
- · It’s hard to sleep when you feel like you’re in a washing machine on a high spin setting
- · No one brushes their teeth before bed, or when they get up. Only saw one other person in our carriage do this apart from us.
- · Cockroaches
- · Wonderful vista of slums as you get into the station.
In my old career, which I won’t
mention here as many of you know what it was, outraged customers with leaking
toilets or broken boilers would say things like, ‘this is like living in the
third world,’ Oh! Unhappy customer! If only you could see what I can see, smell
what I can smell, you’d realise; your centrally heated, carpeted flat with the
minor leak from the loo is a FRICKIN’ AMBROSIAL PARADISE of gorgeous
heavenliness.
These homes on the sides of the
railway lines have been build from whatever people can find; bits of wood, bits
of plastic, torn sheets. They have open views of the platform and of the trains
rumbling past. People shit in the river that runs past, the banks of the river
are clogged with about 30 years worth of plastic bottles, beer cans, crisp
packets, animal bones, the rubbish that people throw out of the train window.
It stinks. It stinks more than the vilest, most putrid thing you can imagine.
It stinks like Glasto portaloos cranked up to 111.
If lucky, bed is a bare
mattress on the floor, if not, it’s a bit of cardboard. How terrifying it must
be to have to try and fall asleep there at night. Their washing hangs from bits
of string tied from one ‘wall’ to another.
I want to drag every person that
has have uttered the words ‘this is like living in the third world’ and make
them spend a night in one of those shacks.
I am suddenly hyper aware of my designer
trainers, the money in my wallet that’s more than what these people make in 6
months, the food in my belly, the Kindle I’m reading my books on. I said before
that to Thai people we are rich, even if by a Western definition we are NOT.
The opportunity to go to
school, work, make money, rent a roof over your head makes us rich. Again, I am
not going to get into discussing poverty in the UK, that’s not what this is
about. I just think that I had never really been truly grateful for being born
in the UK before.
The hotel we check into is a
faded glory; it has impressive marble floors, gold fittings, a huge pool. But
there’s something very eerie about it. The layout doesn’t make any sense and we get
lost on one occasion trying to navigate our way to the lobby without using the
lift (turns out you can’t.) There’s doors and staircases that don’t go anywhere.
There’s a feel of The Shining about
the place, and I would not have been surprised to see two little girls standing
at the end of one of the spooky, empty, long hallways.
You can navigate fairly easily
around the stretch of the Sukhumvit Road, using the Sky Train, which basically
only goes two ways (up and down the road, linking to the Metro in the middle.)
Along the road are enormous
shopping malls. These places make Westfield look like Hemel Hempstead. There’s
one centre that is exclusively high end designer brands; Louis Vuitton, Chanel,
Armani, Dior….all the shops are brand new, plush, shiny-shiny. There’s pubs and
cocktail bars in the basement serving European lager at over £6 a pint. Pretty
much each stop along the road has a mall like this, and they are building more.
We saw signs for three more developments on our way to the airport.
Scam-rama-Sam
– Or, How we got ‘Derren Browned’
One day, we decided to walk to
the Old Town. We take the Sky Train a few stops – I actually give away books
(unheard of) at a second hand book store, and then we walk.
There’s a man taking photos of
hedges that have been cut into elephants. He blocks the pavement.
‘Sorry!’ he says, laughing. ‘Elephants
are lucky when their trunks are raised!’
‘That’s OK,’ we say, and try
and walk on.
‘Where are you from?’ he asks,
and follows us down the street. It’s hard to extricate ourselves from him, and
before we know it, he’s engaged us into a long conversation (interrupted only
by a phone call from his ‘wife’) and then is herding us into his friends
tuk-tuk to take us ‘to the Export Centre’ because they have ‘a today only offer
for tourists’
We go about 2 minutes up the
road and get out (traffic is so slow, it’s quicker to walk.) Tuk-tuk man looks
fucked off; he’s not going to get his commission for taking us to the Export Centre and then
mind-fucking us into buying boat trips and fake emeralds.
We should have known, really.
When Lucky Elephant man asked us where we were before Bangkok, and we said ‘Mae
Rim,’ he has no idea where that was, despite telling is he is originally from
Chiang Mai. This is a bit like someone saying they are from London, but have
never heard of Ealing.
Here be the lesson: don’t trust
a man that gets a mysterious phone call from his wife right before his tuk-tuck
driving mate rocks up. Wish we could have called his bluff on that one, and
said, ‘that wasn’t your wife!’ Cest la Vie!
The
Ballard of the Lonely Middle-Aged Man
For our last night in the city,
we move to another hotel. This one is much nicer; it’s lovely and we wish we’d
found it first. However, to get to it, you have to walk through some real
sleaze.
Loud bars, full of lonely, fat,
white men, drinking beer and talking to pretty young Thai girls. I hate it, it
makes my skin crawl. I don’t judge the girls (if you don’t do this, you’ll
probably be sleeping in one of those shacks on the railway embankment.) but I
do judge the men. I judge the look of hungry desperation on their faces. I
judge them for being so stupid, they think these girls genuinely enjoy their company,
genuinely enjoy having to do what they do with them
The only bar on this street I’ll
go in is a pool one, and only then because there are two Western girls in there
having a drink. The whole place revolts me.
We had planned a trip to the
Khao San Road, and I am glad we didn’t. Soi 4 on Sukhumvit Road was enough for
me and my prim and proper sensibilities.
We leave Bangkok early on a
hot, sunny morning, and I am not sorry to go.
Further
Mysteries of the Thai Way of Life
Police smoke and use their
mobile phones while riding along on their motorbikes, setting an excellent
example of road safety.
Shops play the explicit versions
of songs. I can only assume this is because they don’t understand the lyrical
content of them, and so don’t mind that children are hearing things like: ‘I’m gonna…..
……and then…… …..and your friend…..ass…..tits…..suck it….bitch, fucking bitch…’
(you get the idea.)
They have a very odd idea of
what Western food is, so you get odd combinations of things, like a pretzel
stuffed with cheese, sweetcorn and mayo (actually pretty tasty) or an ‘English
breakfast’ that’s a frankfurter and an poached egg on a baguette. My advice –
if in doubt, stick to the Thai options on the menu.
Green tea flavoured Kit-Kat
Cornettos.
Never giving you milk with your
tea (I’m guessing this is because Brits
are pretty much the only people in the world that put milk in tea.)
Never giving you a receipt for
anything you buy, ever. Looking at you oddly when you ask for one, then going, ‘No,
we don’t do those! Idiot!’
