the International Express to Butterworth

Travel Truth #6: Don't trust the hype, whether good or bad. 

One of the things that's always bedeviled my travels is the tendency of other travelers to twitter with needless positiveness about things that really gargle balls. 

The Man in Seat 61 asserts that you've no need to reserve a first-class sleeper on the Thai-Malaysia train, 'cause the second-class sleepers are excellent and serviceable. It was definitely the latter, but not the former. I had a comfy seat in the daytime, and delicious train food, but my upper berth had barely enough room to roll over. If you do decide to travel second-class on the run from Bangkok to Butterworth, make sure to get a spacious lower berth with a window. That's all I'm going to say. 

On Sunday, July 27, I awoke at 8, showered, breakfasted, exchanged two hundred dollars for 634 Malaysian ringgit, and was set to go by 9:30 a.m. I lazed around until 11:45, reading Dune and chatting with Miss H, relishing the air conditioning and putting off the moment when I'd have to set foot in that hot, humid hell outside the hostel as long as possible. I checked out at noon, got my $10 security deposit back, and hired a tuk-tuk to take me to Hua Lamphong Station for 100 baht—once again beating back my burgeoning bargaining skills. 

I spent a couple of hours lounging around Hua Lamphong's massive lobby, staring at inscrutable commercials on Jumbotrons and portraits of the king and hearing cheesy food court music. The latter made me hungry, so I hauled my heavy pack into the stuffy, sweltering food court and ate a last delicious plate of pad thai for 40 baht. At two o'clock, I went to platform five, car two, seat thirty-one. 

The attendant came by with the dinner and breakfast menu. I ordered fried veggies with shrimp for my repast, and made a few notes in my journal. 

There were two things I thought I should mention about Thailand before I left it. First, unlike the Vietnamese or Cambodians, the Thais drive on the left side of the road, like the Brits or Japanese do. Second, even the poorest Thais—including the ones in the slums which the train chugged past on its way south out of Bangkok—could afford brass birdcages with mynah birds in them. I'd been seeing these birds—renowned for centuries as clever mimics, on par with parrots—since Phnom Penh, both in the wild and kept as pets. 

The attendant made up the beds at 7:30, and I lost my comfy seat by the window. By that time it was too dark to see anything anyway. Everyone from Kipling to Conrad has written about the swiftness of the equatorial sunset, but I'd never seen it put into practice before. I was a long time in getting to sleep, rolling around uncomfortably in my sardine can of an upper berth. This was way more awkward and unpleasant than my upper berth on the Reunification Express in Vietnam had been. I almost wished I was back there, prayer-chanting old ladies and squalling infants notwithstanding. 

I passed a hot, aching, bumpy, noisy night, and woke when dawn was just beginning to tinge the eastern horizon a neon tangerine. I had breakfast in my bunk, as my lower berth-mate hadn't deigned to wake yet. Two hours later, bored and cramped and antsy from missing what was surely a stupendous sunrise, I leaped down into the corridor and peeked through the curtain. The bastard was awake in there, playing games on his iPad with his smartphone serving as a mobile hotspot. That got my dander up. No way the bugger would monopolize that space while I scrunched and squozed around up top. So I knocked quite loudly on the partition and caught his eye through the gap between the curtains. He jumped up apologetically and fetched the attendant, who folded up the beds and took away the bedding. Both of us were installed in our rightful seats again by 7:30 a.m. sharp. 

Ten minutes later the train rolled into Hat Yai, the last major Thai stop. My lousy seatmate got off here—just how long was he intending to loaf around in bed, anyway? I got a new seatmate, a middle-aged but not unattractive woman whose nationality—Malay or Thai—I couldn't discern. 

We reached the border town of Pedang Besar at 9:30 a.m. I was one of the first off the train and through immigration. Piece of cake—a quick glance at my passport and a tourist stamp. The customs inspector had a quick look inside my bag, but zipped it up again and handed it back to me with no questions asked. Why can't all border crossings be this easy?

And at 1:00 local time (12:00 Bangkok time) we rolled into Butterworth. But I'll tell you all about that in the next post. 

Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua (Tiger Temple)

A scant 30 minutes from the River Kwai bridge was the golden horn of this little seventy-dollar tour I'd taken out of Bangkok on Saturday, July 26: Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua. The Tiger Temple.

Billed as a chance to score some one-on-one time with the rare, elusive Indochinese tiger, the reality turned out to be neither one-on-one nor much time at all. We strode across half a kilometer of dusty temple grounds, strewn with indolent, wandering water buffalo and skittish deer, to the nexus of the action, a spot fancifully called "Tiger Canyon." It was a gully naturally carved out of the pale rock and ochre dust, leaving a natural shady grotto with an artificial waterfall built by some thoughtful, wealthy, and guilt-wracked Thai millionaire. We eager guests traversed the the gravel and hard-packed dust to the bottom of the gully, where a stout fence and double lines of gawkers heralded our arrival at the tiger paddock. Beyond this fence, tigers—some dozen of them—sprawled everywhere near the rock pool at the base of the waterfall, spreading themselves out like the viscous liquid which all somnolent cats resemble. Tanned, dreadlocked foreign volunteers sorted us into two lines: the camera-bearers and the camera-less. I was shunted into the former. When I got to the head of the line, a curt Thai volunteer grasped my wrist and hustled me from one tiger to the next, shoving me into a crouch, snatching my camera away, snapping a picture or two, yanking me to my feet, and packing me off to the next recumbent feline form. The whole affair was run with the efficiency of an assembly line and the quickness of a soccer substitution. I didn't get to savor the fact that I was sitting next to, or petting, a goddamn tiger. It was rather anticlimactic. 

  

I wasn't in the sweetest of moods after the three-and-a-half-hour trip back to Bangkok. Imagine my surprise and delight when I reentered my cubicle at Boxpackers and discovered a lovely handwritten note from Emilia, my Kentish dorm-mate. Sadly, our paths had parted. After I'd left for my tour at 6:30, she had checked out at noon, bound by train for Chiang Mai. I had considered leaving her a note, but hadn't wished to appear forward and creepy; so I'd desisted. She was more earnest. In her missive she wrote that it had been nice to meet me, and she wished me well on the rest of my journey. It's not often you meet such genuineness out on the road. I do hope she and I meet again someday. 

the bridge on the River Kwai

...as seen on TV.

After lunch, it was off to the River Kwai bridge, made famous by both a book and a movie, which I've read and seen respectively. In actual fact, the tour turned out to be 50 minutes at the perplexingly planned and poorly cared-for Jeath War Museum, and about 10-20 minutes on the actual bridge itself. 

What does this have to do with British P.O.W.s dying horribly?

And the bridge wasn't even the "real" bridge—that got bombed out by the Allies during the war. (The museum had mistakenly depicted American jet bombers attacking the bridge in a large painting on one wall.) The bridge I stood on that sweltering Saturday of July 26, 2014 was built entirely by the Japanese as part of their war indemnity. 

The whole thing felt half-assed, to be frank. There were some cute little leopard cubs at a petting zoo nearby, so there was that. 

the floating markets of Kanchanaburi

It was rather like a field trip, only we didn't stop by school first. The bus came right to my house. At the crack of dawn I was up and ready, but the tour company beat me to the punch. I was still throwing things into my satchel when a bleary-eyed young night clerk came up to tell me a car was parked downstairs for me. I dashed down and leaped into a full-size van, and off we went. There were already two bony, exhausted-looking young Italian girls inside, and on our way out of Bangkok we stopped to pick up three burly Indian fellows and two elderly, grinning Australian women. 

The driver was a tall, gaunt man with longish hair and a Heineken baseball cap who barely spoke two words and spent our rest stops sitting in the driver's seat and smoking a listless cigarette. The guide was a shorter, bug-eyed, toad-mouthed fellow with close-cropped graying hair. He introduced himself thus: "My name Cham Long. You call me Long Cham." He grinned a lot and had a wicked sense of humor. He kept patting my pudgy stomach and asking me when my due date was, and he hinted incessantly that one of the three Indian fellows was a ladyboy. 

The tour was good, but it was so...rushed. We had only an hour at the floating markets (after a two-hour drive to get there!) which was just enough time for a quick paddle around—for 200 baht—and a sip of coconut juice.

  

The markets were a royal letdown. I don't mean to be one of those twits who always yaps about authenticity, but the floating markets of Kanchanaburi weren't authentic at all. You could see this whole place had been set up for the tourists' sake. Everything: the boat rides, the cheap souvenirs, the countless Buddha and elephant statues carved from jade and quartz...it was all to fleece the fat white folks from the big city. There were no locals there apart from the mongers and merchants, just foreign phonies like me. I felt like such a poser sitting in that wooden boat, my sandalled feet wet with bilge water, snapping selfies and sucking on a coconut with a straw in it. I'm never going back. 

After we finished with the markets, Long Cham rounded us up and we were whisked off to lunch, an assortment of spicy, savory Thai dishes laid out buffet-style at a roadhouse. We were all too hungry to make much conversation, and people pretty much stuck to their own cliques. I was the only solo traveler, but that's fine; I was never much for conversation anyway. 

After another long drive, we found ourselves at...

Bangkok, day two: Chinatown

So much for my promise about walking everywhere today (Friday, July 25, 2014). I was feeling so drained after my grueling trek through riverside Bangkok (and so at peace with the world after my lengthy rest in Wat Suthat) that I hired a tuk-tuk to take me to Chinatown for dinner.

Innovative solution...

Fortunately the food was pretty dang good, and so was the beer, or there would have been trouble. 

Coconut curried crab. Since I was breaking rules today, why not break my no-food-selfie rule, too?

As you can see from the signs, I could have had shark fin or bird's nest soup, but I thought I'd keep things simple. And humane.

I was rather disappointed in the place. It had all the authenticity of a corny Japanese theme park, all the priciness of a Sino-Korean neighborhood, and all the dirt and slime and grunge of a Vietnamese metropolis. I ate quickly at Lek & Rut Seafood, paid 500 baht(!!!), and caught a tuk-tuk back to Hua Lamphong Station.

Here's where things really started to go south. I rode the Skytrain (Line 2) from Hua Lamphong to the transfer station at Sukhumvit/Asok, but the rush-hour crowds there were beyond imagining. I would have had to wait in line for an hour just to get a ticket, let alone actually board the Line 1 train. So I said "Screw it" and decided to hunt up a beer bar I'd heard about, BREW Beers & Ciders. I knew it was on Sukhumvit 55, and I was on Sukhumvit Road anyway, so I strolled about ten or twelve blocks south, from Asok to Thong Lo, and turned left (east) on Sukhumvit 55 as darkness fell. I walked a good kilometer along the gum-pocked sidewalk, dodging scooter drivers and ladyboy hookers and drunken salarymen and horny foreigners looking for a fix and a quick fuck. I finally reached the alley where BREW allegedly was, but I couldn't find it. I walked up and down, past other trendy and upscale bars, coffeehouses, and Thai-Chinese fusion restaurants, but I never located it. I later learned that I had walked right by it. It lay at the mouth of the alley, but it was hidden from me by some stupid outdoor seafood restaurant that took up half a block and hid the bar from my view. 

I was hot, sweaty, footsore, and felt like I'd hiked 80 miles. I hiked back to Thong Lo and caught the Skytrain home. The crowds had thinned out by this time. I showered, checked in with my Kentish cubicle-neighbor Emilia, updated my journals, and hit the sack.

Tomorrow: my package tour of Kanchanaburi, northwest of Bangkok, begins with the floating markets. 

Bangkok, day two: Wat Suthat and the Giant Swing

After I left Wat Phony I walked all the way around the National Museum, the royal palace and Wat Phra Kaew. Seemed to take hours, though it was barely one. No tuk-tuks today, remember? I'd promised myself. 

I'd originally intended to tour the palace and Wat Phra Kaew, but I changed my mind when I came around the corner of the palace wall and saw the pulsating throng crowding the main gate. White tourists buses kept rolling up and disgorging clamoring heaps of pudgy, fatuous, ridiculously-dressed Asian and European tourists, and I "couldn't get no show" as Mark Twain would say. I walked on, past the museum, fighting my way through the stagnant afternoon heat, trailing a japing pack of young Thai army cadets on a long and completely unnecessary detour around Saranrom Park. I probably should've stopped and strolled through this park, but didn't because another pack of army cadets was doing drills in it and I didn't want to have anything to do with the military while I was here. 

On the east side of the park I was accosted by a plain-clothed policeman of Chinese descent with a bristly, pencil-thin mustache and a whiny, nasally voice who wanted me to walk (or rather, hire a tuk-tuk) to take me to the giant standing Buddha at Wat Intharawihan. I nodded, said I'd consider it, and walked north to Wat Suthat (and the Giant Swing, which isn't really a swing at all). 

In this temple, I found Nirvana—or the closest thing to it on such a hot, miserable, swampy day. I sat down on the red velvet floor and gazed contemplatively over the enormous sitting Buddha, with his long earlobes and his languorous hooded eyes and his lips tinged with that old Angkor smile. I liked Wat Suthat better than any other temple I'd been in, and I've been to temples in six Asian countries. I've been to temples with Buddha statues of solid emerald and floors of pure silver, temples with heaps of glittering gold artifacts sitting at the Enlightened One's feet, temples saturated with the smell of incense and washed with the rays of the sun and the spray of the sea. To blazes with them all; I liked Wat Suthat. 

It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was airy and breezy and cool. There were hardly any phonies. The ceiling was high and vaulted and had all the quiet reverential quality of a church. The pillars and walls were coated in scenes depicting the life and trials of the prince Siddhartha, fantastically intact after all this time. There were a few worshipers—old men, mostly—quietly meditating and bowing. Electric fans hummed soothingly away in the background. I sat on the temple grounds for 40 minutes and inside the temple proper for 15, just soaking up the atmosphere (and drying off after my long walk). 

Bangkok, day two: Wat Pho

No descriptions this time—I'm just going to let the great Reclining Buddha speak for itself. It was so massive I couldn't even fit all of it into one photograph:

The only thing you need to know about Wat Pho apart from that is that it's usually full of phonies—hipster kids in their doofy narrow-brimmed straw fedoras and couples my age in those ridiculous elephant pants that somehow make them look even more like tourists. They were everywhere. Should've been called Wat Phony...