The Train

The train from Bangkok to Chumphon thundered south under what would have been crystalline blue skies had it not been for the shimmering haze that clung to the air like an infinite swarm of sweaty gnats. I sat in second class in a well-worn blue seat next to a gnarled old Thai fellow. Fans whirred overhead as they labored to push scalding air around the carriage. Although he breeze through the open windows was almost a pleasant shade of hot and rendered the car a tolerable furnace, we all paid for it when the train swept through controlled burning in track side fields and great billowing clouds of smoke and ash caused everyone to gag and wave newspapers and magazines around frantically in a feeble attempt to rid themselves of the noxious fumes.

Leaving Bangkok we rolled past an ocean of shantytowns. Blankets covered with brilliant red and ochre-colored chillies lay drying on the corrugated metal roofs, soaking up the suns heat as if to further add to their potency. Everything was filthy. At one point I saw a family casting water bottles and food wrappers aside as they made a clear patch on which to spread their picnic blanket beside a "stream" that had some suspiciously fecal-looking detritus bobbing along its surface. Laundry hung behind the pitiful shacks and the smoke of a million cooking fires rose to join its cousins that belched apologetically from the poorly maintained buses, trucks, cars and scooter that plied every horizontal surface like so many ants on a dead lizard. There were periodic pauses in this nearly uninterrupted sprawl of filth, namely the pristine green grass and manicured gardens that surrounded the shrines dedicated to Thailand's beloved king.
From the moment we pulled out of the station vendors began making their way through the carriages in a steady stream. They hawked all manner of unidentifiable edibles ranging from fruit and nuts to rice and meat dishes to things I couldn't begin to describe. I didn't indulge as I was still full from my lunch of noodles at the train station "food court." For a dollar I had gotten an adequate plate of fried noodles, beansprouts, egg, tofu, peanuts, green onion, and a handful of nappy dried shrimp which neither crunched nor chewed but rather stuck in the mouth and tasted distinctly of bait. Add a scoop of fish sauce, sugar and a handful of fresh orange chillies as garnish and you have yourself a pretty decent feed for a buck. The two small cockroaches that watched me eat with interest from the wall had the decency to wait until I stood up to leave before they attacked my plate. After my lunch I went outside for a smoke and encountered that bastion of Thai cuisine, KFC. They were advertising what looked suspiciously like a crab sushi roll, battered and then fried in the same dank oil in which they fry their foul chicken and pasty french fries. The little cartoon crab on the poster pointed to the pink inside of the roll with his claw and flashed an unlikely toothy grin. I supposed that he had a lot to be happy about since the "crab" meat in the roll was likely a formed chunk of whitefish imbued with pink food coloring and the idea of crab and not himself or his mom. Given that universal trend in fast food photography whereby things look more appealing then they really are, (your Big Mac's brown iceberg lettuce, oxidized 1000 islands dressing and flaccid gray meat paddy always look a lot more appetizing on the glowing board above the counter than they do when they arrive in the grease-spattered box telling you you're about to consume 50% of your daily sodium and fat in four rancid bites) this fired crab roll must look appalling in reality since it looked pretty damn disgusting in the polished picture.

My seat mate turned out to be the father of Pearl, a beautiful Thai girl who sat with the mother of Pearl across the aisle. Pearl spoke faltering English but it was hard to understand here over the crashing of the train. She asked me questions, many on the behalf of her father, and explained that she was a hairdresser and had been living with her sister in "Awstwaia" and was going home to Chumphon for the first time in many months. I was quite enamored by her almond eyes, dark skin, slender figure and friendly demeanor but any advances were made difficult by the presence of her friendly but watchful parents.
Do you know why a peanut is called a peanut? Neither did I until Pearl's dad gave me a handful of peanut shells. These were not like our peanuts but softer, I guess they were unroasted or less-roasted, and once I infiltrated the soft shell (at first with limited success to the amusement of my new friends) I discovered a moist, squishy, purple fruit very much like...a pea. Go figure. They were a bit mealy but tasty and refreshing without the saltiness that sends the North American peanut eater straight to the beer fridge.

After we left Bangkok's shacks and smog behind the landscape transformed into a very flat, very hot plain. Emerald green rice paddies vividly superimposed over the murky waters in which they grew. Pal-studded fields of hay, some cut with golden bales baking in the sun. Small pastures where herds of longhorned cattle serenely chewed grass while their herders sat under trees with shirts draped over their heads, one eye closed and the other watching that their bovine charges didn't wander onto the tracks and kill us all. I was in need of a cigarette so I took my notebook and strolled uptrain past a dirty kitchen where a very fat woman (a bit of a rarity in Thailand and in other countries where people still eat decent food and do manual labor) was pumping out copious amounts of the food that the vendors trucked relentlessly up and down the aisles and found myself in the "dining car." A woman who looked like she had spent more than a few nights servicing the needs of lusty farang in back alley Bangkok pointed to a chair and brought me my icy Singha dripping with condensation right out of the fridge. One of the major challenges facing the beer lover in the tropics is how to keep the damn beverage cold. My solution is a simple one, drink fast. A Thai man I will refer to as Fu in honor of his droopy, beerfroth-encrusted fu manchu sat next to me guzzling beer from a glass brimming with ice. He chain smoked menthol cigarettes and had made it his raison d'etre to periodically change the disc in the portable dvd player that was hooked up to a large speaker mounted on the wall. Blasting from this speaker at top volume came forth a steady procession of horrifically shitty Thai pop music that seemed to cross Eric Clapton's over-rated guitar riffs with the wailing of Celine Dion, a second-rate drum machine programmer, and the latent homosexuality of an American boyband. Music videos, already sporting the bobbing lyrics along the bottom to facilitate karaoke, accompanied these lamentably terrible songs and depicted young Thai men with too much hair singing and doing one of three things: lying in the grass crying, talking on a cellphone, or riding a scooter. Every video had a pretty Thai girl, presumably the singer's amour, talking to another man on a cellphone or riding a scooter with another man. The singer would mournfully sit dejected in the grass holding his head and trying to call the girl on his cellphone but, predictably, she was always on the line with the other man, or perhaps talking to her friends about the other man on her cellphone while riding behind him on a scooter towards the place in the grass where the singer was sitting and just happened to see the couple drive by smiling or talking on their cellphones. The only variation on this scene was a bizarre rasta video in which two men are sitting on a stoop. One man is holding a rooster on his lap while the other man appears to fondle the rooster in a way that would not be appreciated my animal rights activists back home. Maybe I saw wrong, I hope so. The rasta and his buddy are probably onto something though since roosters can't talk on cellphones, ride scooters, can be killed with impunity and thus their faithfulness is assured.
Fu was shitfaced and kept trying to engage me in conversation. As much as I would have liked to chat, he didn't seem to get the picture that I DIDN'T SPEAK THAI!!!! and therefore could not discuss the merits of rooster love with him. Fu proceeded to try and sell me a caseless and hopelessly scratched Buddah Bar Lounge cd. It took some time and a lot of wild gesticulation before he finally grasped that I was not under any circumstances going to purchase his shitty cd and we rolled on for awhile in a cordial silence broken only by the chatter of the staff, the rattle of the train and the occasional clink of our glasses as we toasted our way southward.
The bar car was also where the ticket taker/guards hung out during the hour or two between stations. The oldest of these guards was a jolly round man who approached me, slapped me on the back and proceeded to try and sell me a hotel room in Chumphon. He had to cut our one-sided conversation about hotels short when he had to go deal with a very drunk man who was lying in between the bar car and the next carriage smoking and picking his nose. Unlike Guatemala, Turkey, Ukraine and Morocco and other places where everyone is selling something, it would appear that in Thailand the travel agents, taxi driver, hotel reps, etc. don't feel compelled to follow you around like a really stinky fart once you have told them that you don't want whatever it is they are selling. I guess it's because there are so many tourists they know that if I'm not an easy mark, the next chump might will be. Who knows? Smiling, the jolly guard grabbed the drunk by the arms and dragged him into a sitting position against the wall, said something to him in Thai that made everybody laugh, the sat down to a cup of coffee with no less than eight tablespoons of sugar to a half cup of instant.

I finished my beer and made my way back to my seat.I chatted with Pearl for a bit and felt that her parents were warming up to me. Things might work out well after all...and then in stumbles Fu, even more hammered than before, carrying a sloshing can of beer. I prayed that he wouldn't talk to me but of course he stopped, slapped me on the back and started spewing Thai while filling the air around us with a sickly effluvium of stale beer, mentholated tobacco and body odor. I did my best to be good-natured while still encouraging him to fuck off but by the time he shambled on towards the bathroom the damage was done. Pearl's dad grimaced with disapproval and muttered something in Thai and from that moment on things were still totally friendly but not quite the same. Needing to wash the bitter taste of defeat out of my mouth (actually I was just thirsty) and acknowledging that although Pearl was a pretty girl, things were a whole lot more entertaining in the bar car and I was in a country of pretty girls, I grabbed my butts and notebook and took my leave.

And things really were a lot better in the bar car. A number of other Thais were on the piss, for some reason none of the farang on the train were indulging other than me, and the bored-looking guards were getting jiggy with a little slap and tickle of the barmaid and her helpers. I observed as every member of the staff in turn dipped a shared cup into a vat of warm-looking water and drank deeply while water splashed all over the place. Fu returned from the bathroom, dipped his no doubt sterile hands into the ice bucket and started dumping ice into every ones beer glasses. I barely kept him from dropping several of the bacteria-laden cubes into my glass. He then plopped down heavily in his chair, whipped out his three cellphones and started making frantic call on one while text messaging on another, always keeping one eye on the third in hopes that it would ring. Between calls he would high-five me, spill some beer on himself, and slam his hand on the table in keeping time to the auditory human rights violation that still blared from the speakers.

As dusk approached, the landscape remained the same save the occasional rocky breast that protruded from the dead flat plains. As the sun set it cast the entire world in a bloody red light that brought to mind the adage "Red sky at night, sailors delight." Glowing from my litre and a half of beer and breathless from the cigarettes I'd been smoking like a champ in an ill-advised scheme to be like my Thai compatriots, I wandered back to my seat, discovered my seatmates asleep and plunked down into a dry-mouthed, fitful slumber until we reached Chumphon.