Some other places and Bangkok again

Well I would tell you a lot about Trang but unfortunately all I know is where the train station is and how to get to the hotel we stayed in from it. My lack of sightseeing was not due to the sad fact that there is absolutely nothing to see in Trang but because I was suffering from a bad hamburger and was locked up in my hotel room with dysentery. I will save you from the gory details but let me just give you all one word of advice when traveling to foreign countries with foreign cuisine. Don’t trust western style food. Stick to the local cuisine. That is twice now. Mel got sick a while back from an expensive restaurant that served western food and I got sick on a hamburger from an international hotel. But anyway, Mel can probably tell you a little more about Trang than I. Like where the hospital and the chemists are.

Trang is famous for being the cleanest city in Thailand. You would never know it. It is also renowned for its coffee (or Koh pii) shops where you can actually get a real coffee that isn’t Nescafe instant with whitener. After three days of clean roads, and not being able to sample the real coffee Mel decided to throw me onto a train to Bangkok because they had better hospitals and English speaking doctors. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of sitting on a train for 18 hours but somehow Mel convinced me it was a good idea. Once on the train I couldn’t remember which one was the good idea. Fortunately two hours later I was feeling much better and could manage a smile now and then.

We decided on a first class sleeper, thank god. We hopped into our little cupboard and after tripping over our bags for 20 minutes we had everything organised and in its place so we could function as normal battery hens. I am making it sound much worse than it was. It was great to have our own space. I love trains, always have. Not in the model train sense or the train spotter sense but in the ‘It’s cool to ride on one’ sense. I have only ridden three or four trains in my life barring the commuter trains I have ridden and living in Auckland doesn’t exactly improve that number by much anyway. This would be my second night train. The first was ten years ago where I traveled from Auckland to Wellington in 4th class. That’s where you have to sleep on the floor. That trip I sat up all night and watched the endless scenery pass by. This trip due to improved sleeping arrangements I slept, but not before exploring the train first.

One thing that has amazed me about Thailand is the lack of signs, the redundancy of them when there are signs and lastly the absurdity of them. After being ten minutes in our cabin Mel decided I needed a blanket and pushed the button which we presumed was the call button for assistance. It was even labeled ‘CALL’ but when a uniformed official turned up with a baton we decided against pushing it again for fear of the train coming to a grinding sparking stop. There was another silver button above the window that I presumed opened the window but the lack of sign, as useless as it would have been anyway, made me reluctant to open the window at all. In the bathroom there was a big sign instructing passengers: WARNING: Do not drop objects into the toilet bowl! I mean, really? Do you need a sign to advise you its not a good idea to drop something in there if you plan on combing your hair or brushing your teeth with it afterwards? Another sign you will find on the windows is aimed at the troublesome sleep walker (no, really) DO NOT OPEN THIS WINDOW WHILE ASLEEP

We whizzed through the night and lets just say that Thailand’s railway tracks don’t appear to be the straightest or smoothest. But the trains do stay on them, well I was hoping anyway. As I moved from car to car I had to time my move right for fear of missing the car I was heading for and walking straight off the train. Okay that’s an exaggeration. But I was trying to think of any reported train derailments in Thailand in the recent and not so recent news.

I had a wander through the other classes on the train and had to giggle at all the tourists attempting sleep. Mel and I had decided that we weren’t going to do things on a shoestring budget. If you want to see Thailand that doesn’t mean sitting up all night in 3rd class watching the scenery because the chickens, goats and mice keep you awake. I am only kidding about the mice. Call us soft but we find beds, sleep, food and other necessities of life important enough to spend every last cent of the pathetic New Zealand dollar we have on. Once we reach London and have to sleep in the gutter I will eat my words.

Anyway it was while wandering through the train I found a plaque bolted onto a car stating the cars were made by Hyundai Precision Industrial. The precision word made me feel better. The Plaque was dated 1996. Four years without a serious de-railment, not bad.

Mel and I woke refreshed and enjoyed a hearty breakfast of Bacon, eggs and a sausage; an American breakfast. Well there was no bacon really and the sausage was more like a sausage roll so it wasn’t really an American Breakfast but more like eggs on toast. Somehow this has become a part of our staple diet but that’s another story. We staggered around the train a bit and out the windows Bangkok, the city of TV aerials, rolled passed two hours before we got there. It’s a big city. We pulled into Hualumpong Station, stepped off the train and into a cab. We knew exactly where we were going. Bangkok kind-a felt like home. It was familiar and we knew at least two street names.

We (Mel)…..yeah, it’s always Mel isn’t it…..(Mel) chose a guest house and when we got there in the cab we found it didn’t exist. We drove around in circles for a bit (at our request) and in the end the taxi driver offered to call the place for us from a pay phone. This was quite odd for Bangkok. This guy was genuinely helpful. The last taxi ride we had going to the train station on our way out was the opposite. The taxi driver wanted to take us shopping when we wanted to catch our train. He was very insistent and I don’t think I have ever used the word ‘no’ as many times in a single conversation before. He didn’t give up until we had our bags out of the boot and into the train station. We decided to look for a guest house by foot and found two 5 meters from where the cab dropped us off. We caught up on a bit of sleep and watched Bangkok go by out our window. 10 Meters out our window was the Skytrain, Bangkok’s brand new monorail. Four floors below was the busy Sukumvit Road, one of the main shopping districts in Bangkok. Some would say that this outlook wasn’t the best and to have a train go by every 20 minutes must have driven us mad but we were in paradise. Noise, traffic noise. Great! When we closed our curtains all the head lights streaked across our ceiling like comets in the night sky. It was magical. Mel turned the room into a disaster zone pretty quick. All she has to do is to open her bag and it all comes leaping out like those cans of snakes you buy. We had a TV and watched some mindless Hollywood trash.

The next day we decided to get on this Skytrain and see what it is all about. After climbing 100 steps up to the train we bought our tickets as little swipe cards and found just as we stepped onto the platform the train was pulling up. The Skytrain is a recent feature in Bangkok, well the working Skytrain is a recent feature. They have been building the raised rails above Bangkok for quite some time. The local government had a hard time finding a contractor who actually wanted to finish the project for next to no money. This is all hearsay. The Skytrain was quite fast. Before we knew it we were at the end of the line at the river. We walked off the platform and onto a longtail on the river. I talked about the longtails in Koh Phi Phi. These longtails were more my kind of boat. We negotiated a price for a tour of the river and canals and we were off on the longtail “SONY MUSIC”. It definitely had the sound system to match it’s name. And these longtails don’t have lawnmower engines on the back. I think our one had a Ford Escort engine on the back, with gears, horn and all. We shot off up the river riding the wake of the much bigger boats and pulled into a canal to be faced with a longtail traffic jam. It turned out to be the canal flood bay and all the longtails queued and crammed into the small corridor until it was full of boats. They then let out the other gate and all the water flowed out, us with it. If you are unfamiliar with canals, they are like side roads to a river. They can be at levels lower than the actual water level of the river so you have flood bays which are like an air lock (if you are familiar with airlocks that is).

Anyway where was I. Oh yeah the canals. It is like the roads are all flooded and you can only get around by boat. The canals were the main form of transport before the car arrived in Thailand. They were just like roads. Street signs and street lamps and all. We were taken on a tour of the streets, which to the average Bangkok Thai it would have been like me taking you in my car around the streets in my neighborhood and charging you 20 bucks. To us it was amazing. The longtail driver showed us his house and at one point we thought he was parking his boat and we were going to go up to his place for a few drinks. He had obviously had a few drinks before we boarded. Next we were off to the Snake Farm to the sound of Brittany Spears.

The Snake Farm is one of the largest research centres in Thailand for antivenom and is the place to come for treating snake bites. It is also the place to come to get snake bites! We saw a show put on by some of the handlers which involved swinging snakes around their heads by their tails, like 30cm away from your face. A snake head went whiz past my eyes and as I turned to see if Mel was watching I saw she had already bolted for the door. The snake show was very impressive. They were in total control of the snakes. They milked a cobra and carried a python around the audience to scare all the girls silly, and all the guys for that matter. When you’re in Thailand and a guy with a snake walks up to you casual like with its mouth open showing all its teeth you don’t really want to stick around. Well I did and felt the snake. All muscle! I wouldn’t want to meet a python on a dark night in a narrow soi street.

We jumped back onto “SONY MUSIC” and were taken back to the pier. Back onto the Skytrain to Siam Square. That’s where the Hard Rock Cafe is along with 100 other food and fashion places. We walked through with the intent of finding an electrical or audio shop. Someone told us there was an audio shop there as I wanted to get a couple of small speakers form my Mini-Disk. Nope, no such thing in Siam Square. We checked out some of the Thai malls instead. One of the malls even had a Men’s Technology floor! This was where they kept all the computers and stereo equipment safe from all the women. As we rode the escalator up to this floor I told Mel she wasn’t allowed to talk and had to look only at the floor. This was a man’s zone. I was only kidding. I was disappointed to see more women on the Men’s tech floor than men and there was even a jewellery store. I figured this was where the men bought all the rings and necklaces for their girlfriends. There was even a Women’s Decor floor too.

We went up to the movie theatres to see if we could catch a movie to while the time away. Hey when in a big city you gotta eat McDonalds and watch movies. When we got to the cinemas the only movies showing were mindless teenage flicks. The Thai movie audience is all teenage. They had some theaters with reclinable lounge chairs too but we decided against hanging out with Bangkok’s affluent teenage population. It would have been fun though.

This brings me to today. We have booked our tickets to Chiang Mai tonight. Another night train. It took us 20 minutes to get into the train station. We were constantly accosted by officials from the tourist authority telling us to book our tickets at the TAT office down the road because the train station is too busy and too hot. What a load of shit quite frankly. They get a name badge and stick a photo of themselves on it and suddenly they can fool any tourist into buying tickets from their travel agency at twice the price. We walked past one guy after thinking he was genuinely trying to help us out but started getting too pushy to come up against another woman telling us not to listen to him because he was a fraud and to get our tickets in the station. We walked past her to find another woman telling us not to listen to her either and at this point Mel had already made a byline to the station and so I followed.

Our train leaves in an hour. Chang Mai should be a nice change. It’s a busy city also but it’s what lies outside Chang Mai that excites us most. Jungle! I have 8 minutes left in this internet cafe before my money runs out and I need to do a quick Mel-Check and send this before I lose everything I have typed.

See ya,
V

Next installment — Chiang Mai