Georgetown to Cambodia - Trains through Thailand

The train. Better than my last share house

One of my favourite things in the world is to spend the night on a sleeper train chunting (shut up, it’s a word) through South East Asia. Years ago, with my brother and other members of team zebra, I traveled from Bangkok north through the Thai jungle to Chang Mai in second class sleeper. It was great. You could sit in your cozy little bunk, open the window and smoke cigarettes, your knuckles gently dislocating against passing trees. Every half an hour a man with a silly uniform shimmied up the aisle with a bucket full of cold beer. The toilet was just a hole in the floor and you could amuse yourself by aiming for the train track as you swayed drunkenly through the night. Who needs a playstation?

           So when Alicia and I booked tickets on the 23 hour sleeper from Georgetown in Malaysia to Bangkok, I had hoped for the same train. After all, it was basically the same line - a 4000km length of track that runs from Singapore to northern Thailand.

            What we got however was, well, a Daewoo. I don’t mean metaphorically, you understand, it was just made by Daewoo. Unlike their cars, some of it was even made of metal. You couldn’t open the windows but that’s ok, I don’t smoke anymore and besides, my knuckles have only just healed.

            The first few hours, until almost the Thai border at Hat Yai, it belted rain. A few days later parts of southern Thailand experienced severe flooding. A friend of mine was stuck on Koh Samui for 3 days.

The Malay-Thai border crossing was trouble free, and by nightfall we were tucking into a big Singha beer and some really decent Thai food. It is impossible to get a bad meal in Thailand. This was food prepared in tiny caboose (I’ve always wanted to use that word) on the back of a rocking Daewoo in the middle of nowhere. Can you imagine if V-line started serving meals?

Soon after dinner the conductor came and performed a sort of grumpy magic act and in about 8 seconds had turned our restaurant table into bunk beds. I immediately jumped into the bottom bunk and, in the manner of all people who are mechanically curious but also idiots, broke something, and spent ten happy minutes making it worse and virtually severing an index finger.

“You’re not going to fix it you know. And look, you’ve got arterial blood on the pillow.”

Alicia had a point.

Luckily the conductor was alerted by the picturesque red mist spraying out of where my finger had been and effortlessly fixed the bunk.

Whether due to blood loss or the rocking motion of the train, I slept for 10 hours and woke up in the sprawling outskirts of Bangkok with a sore hand and a chest infection. I still loved it though.

The view from our hovel in Bangkok

After an hour or so tooling around the backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road, we found a $8 room on the 427^th floor of a little hotel with no lift. Then we went drinking for a couple of days.

It is impossible not to drink too much beer and have fun in Thailand. I have seen women in full burqas staggering down Khao San Rd clutching a Chang and screaming Cold Chisel songs in what might have been Arabic at 11am. The beer is too good, the weather is too hot and the beer is too…beer. In certain parts of Bangkok even the water is beer, whatever that means.

A number of days later (I think it was between 2 and 9) we left for Cambodia.

There are two ways to get to Siem Reap in Cambodia. One is convenient and comfortable but can cost upwards of $9 which is how I found myself standing outside our hotel at 5am. I hadn’t even realized there was a 5am and had to google it just to be sure it wasn’t some sort of hoax.

Pre-dawn Bangkok is a strange and worrying place. Lost backpackers with warm Singhas hanging from dangling arms wobble their way home, wondering how they had spent their whole budget for 6 weeks in Loas on a hangover and herpes. Face-masked street sweepers battle rats the size of Toyotas and shiny-toothed taxi drivers quote ambitious prices to lure drunks to the early morning ping pong shows.

One driver in a rusty little cab told us that it was better to let him drive us to Siem Reap, a mere 400km away. He showed us with misplaced pride photos of the little car, boot open and stuffed with backpacks, with about 16 nervous-looking Germans crammed in the back seat, probably thinking, “Zis vas not in ze brochure”.

Alicia eating a cricket on Khao San Rd

            We had to walk away from the tourist ghetto to find a taxi that would take us to the station for less than an airfare to Bhutan, but we got there on time. I managed to purchase the appropriate ticket and find the platform without swearing at anyone - most unusual for me when traveling before breakfast.

            The train left on time just as the thick smog on the eastern horizon became a shade lighter than the thick smog covering the rest of the sky, this I believe is called a Bangkok sunrise. Or is that a sex act? Anyway the train was old and slow with no air-con and windows that opened so far that you could cheerfully decapitate yourself trying to take photos of the back half of the train. It was about $2 dollars for the 7 hour trip to the Cambodian border at Aranyaprathet.

After about an hour, the endless slums of Bangkok, um, ended, and we were tootling through green paddy fields interspersed with patches of jungle and an overloaded scooter or two - the ubiquitous and pleasing backdrop to most South East Asian train travel. I knew this would be our last train trip for quite a while - Cambodia only has one cargo train that leaves from somewhere not very interesting and arrives 17 hours later at somewhere even less interesting 45 km away - so I decided to enjoy it.

As we got nearer midday and the border, the landscape dried out and turned to flat scrub scattered with Eucylypt plantations. The smell of gums, the brain-melting heat and the brown grass could very nearly have been country Victoria - the mallee maybe. Except people from Wycheproof don’t have conical hats and Honda scooters.

So we arrived, sweaty and wary, at the Cambodian border - according to our guidebook a place rife with scams.