Overnight Train to Chang Mai

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This morning I got an email from a hotel that I had contacted in Chiang Mai, giving the details and confirming our reservation. Hotel D'Moc has a travel agency in the lobby, and I was able to book four second class sleeper berths ( I have been assured by several people it is not worth paying for first class) for the train tonight at 6:00 pm. We have emailed several hotels/ guest houses in Pai (where we plan to go from Chiang Mai), but so far have had no luck getting reservations there. We checked out of our room around noon and paid to store our luggage while we did school work in the lobby. At around 4 pm, we took a taxi to the train station.

The train station in Bangkok is fairly modern and well equipped. As we entered, someone from the railway staff greeted us and told us what platform our train would leave from. After always being approached by someone wanting to sell you something, it almost seems a bit strange to have someone just helping you.

The entire set up at the train station seemed fairly organized and we bought some provisions for the trip, remembering our experiences with train food in Vietnam. When we finally boarded the train, it seemed like a good set up with far more space than the bus. Many of our fellow traveller were also tourists, so it had a familiar vibe. As this is a slower train, there were numerous stops as we headed out of Bangkok.

We ordered our dinner and breakfast at the same time, and when dinner came, we were taking our malaria pills with it as we will need them for Northern Thailand.

I pulled out the GPS and fired it up to see our progress on the map. One of the features it has is the ability to tell you how far your are from various places that you have added to “favourites” so it was interesting to see just how far we were from places like our hut in Fiji or home.

After dinner, they come around and begin converting the day seat into berths for sleeping. This is quite a process, but the end result is impressive and results in two good size bunks for each set of seats. In addition to the fitted linens, you are handed a few sealed plastic bags with your comforter and pillow packaged in them.

When the carriage is completely transformed it is a weird world of curtained off spaces, swaying slightly with the train. The individual berths, probably gave us more isolation from each other than we have had in months, which seemed a bit weird at first.

When I was younger, I used to hop freight trains. It was undoubtedly a stupid thing to do, but there was something about the serenity of drifting through Northern Ontario on a flat bed rail car that was irresistible. Sitting in a dimly lit cocoon and watching Thailand go by behind the window, seemed to bring me back to those days. I had my ipod with me and set up a play list of all the songs that I could find that had train rhythm in them (“Hey Porter”, by Johnny Cash, “Graceland”, by Paul Simon's, along with some Arlo Guthry and Bob Dylan). The moon rose as we began to leave the city lights behind. The lines from “Song to Woody Guthrey”, a tribute to the rail hopping blues players of the thirties, ran through my headphones:

Here's to Sisco, and Sonny, and Leadbelly too
And all the good folks who went traveling with you
But the last thing that I would want to do
Is to say that I've done some hard travelling too

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