Trains, pains and travel sickness pills

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So yesterday was the first real test of the travel sickness medication. I’ve suffered from motion sickness for as long as I can remember. car journeys, rail, rollercoasters, boats - especially boats always make me violently sick. Bearing in mind the coming year, by it’s very nature will involve quite a lot of, well, traveling, especially on unsurfaced roads and small boats, I went to see my GP, who was incredibly sympathetic and gave me these little pills that you stick under your gum 15 minutes before travelling, and some advice about nibbling ginger biscuits. She was much more understanding than my mother, who when she saw my ever increasing stash of medication for the trip, called me a weakling.
I had intended to try out the pills before we left, when we were last over to visit Mal’s folks. This is no offense to Archie’s driving but the undulating country roads of Northern Ireland have made me consistently sick ever since i first slid helplessly across the leather back seats of George Wheeler’s jag on the way in from the airport over 12 years ago.
But with one thing and another, I never managed to take the pills in time, or not consistently, so sometimes i felt sick, sometimes i sat in the front, which makes it better anyway, but mostly i feel asleep about 10 minutes into the journey, having closed my eyes to lessen the motion sensation. Not very scientific.
So there I was, about to undertake a 30 minute cab ride through bangkok in rush hour, and8 hour trip on a sleeper train followed a three hours on a speed boat to get to Koh Tao with no clue whether I’d be ill or not, and if I was, what that mean for all the journeys still ahead.
It’s fair to say i was pretty apprehensive.
The sleeper trains are amazing. At first sight they look like regular commuter trains, with pairs of seats facing each other either side of the aisle. Initially we thought that the travel agent had screwed us and we weren’t going to get the bunks we’d paid for, and would just have seats for 8 hours, that weren’t even next to each other . Closer inspection revealed that the seats slid across to make a bed and the upper bunks pulled down from the ceiling with the luggage racks acting as ladders. When the time came a man came and pulled down the bunks and made the beds up with pillows and sheets and blankets (which were a little unnecessary bearing in mind that we were in a second class cabin which meant a fan and not air conditioning and the height of our cheaper upper bunks meant that we were above the level of any of the cool air the fan was producing). Nevertheless, as soon as I was ensconced in my bunk, the hypnotic motion of the train had me asleep in no time, and i think i slept pretty much all the way to our destination at Chumpong dreaming of the so far elusive mango and sticky rice.
Mal had a little more restless night as he had been charged with guardianship of the watch. This was quite stressful, as although we knew our original arrival time, a delay in leaving Bangkok meant that we could no longer be sure what time we would be at our stop. Bearing in mind there were no announcements or route maps on board, our upper bunks were windowless and the were shutters over the windows on the lower bunks anyway, we would be pretty much guessing when to get off, or hoping there was someone else on the carriage who was getting of too and knew what was going on. My money was on the American chap behind us who i’d watched deftly fixing his shoe with gaffer tape earlier. He looked like the diving type, I concluded, so assumed that he and his lady companion would be alighting with us. The fact that they were awake and ready to go (and making lists) when Mal’s alarm went off, at around the time we were originally meant to arrive, only sought to confirm this for me and I began to entertain vague fantasies about befriending the Americans and the four of us sitting on a beach hut balcony, playing scrabble and discussing world politics.
As it turned out, the helpful bunk-maker man returned to tell us we were 10 minutes from our destination. As we got off, the Americans remained aboard, and I watched my dreams of chatting about the merits of Obama’s choice of VP heading into the distance as the train pulled out of the station.
I think this particularly irked me as I had convinced myself that I had some sort of informed opinion on this issue. As CNN had been the only English language channel we had in our room in Bangkok, we had been fed a daily diet of US election information for the last week. Aside from whether the Chinese had fielded an illegal team of children in the gymnastics at the Olympics, Obama’s choice of Biden as VP was pretty much all we had heard about and i was desperate to use this otherwise useless head full of information on some Americans before it was erased by the sound of waves lapping on the shore.
Which by now of course, it already has been, and I can’t be entirely sure I even know what the prospective vice president’s name is. Even though a few days ago I knew how many grandchildren he had, his foreign policy experience and his views on abortion, I’m pretty much going to have to google him to check his name before I post this blog.
The swift replacement of information is becoming a bit if an issue for me. I think my head might be full, which seems a little unfortunate as I’m sure I read somewhere that we only use about 10% of our minds at any given time.
The train journey - which was followed by a transfer to the pier and then an amazing 3 hour boat ride to Koh Tao and the procurement of a traditional wooden bungalow complete with porch and hammock, yards from the sea and overlooking a beautiful bay - is now such a distant memory I can barely recall it, even though it was less than 36 hours ago. I think this may become a common problem as more and more new sights and sounds are added, so I am going to have to resolve to record all my experiences on my trusty ibook, whose memory is a lot more reliable that mine, much simpler to revisit, and unlike mine, upgradable. It would be a shame to get back from a year of new adventures with my only abiding memory being what I had to eat on the plane on the way home from Nairobi.
Back to the original point of this entry - the effectiveness of the medication. Well, the only time I felt even slightly ill, was when I got off the train at Chumpong, and this was probably more to do with the fact I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for 12 hours, and a full fat coke and some salty crisps soon had me right as rain. The boat ride was a revelation. I can’t remember the last time I got on any sort of boat and didn’t feel rough, ferry boats, sail boats, narrow boats - they all make me as sick as a dog. But I actually managed to enjoy the ride today for the first time ever. So it seems the drugs do work - I just hope I brought enough with me.

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