Slow Train

It’s always a balancing act putting together a vacation that’s going to have a little something for everyone. The challenge is multiplied when you’re traveling with another family. The weeks leading up to Christmas break were a flurry of emails between Hong Kong and Florida as we worked out the details of our pending trip.

As different plans were put on and then taken off the table, there was one item I quietly hung onto. I parried, I deflected, I cajoled. And then finally, we booked our overnight sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai in the north. You can’t spend fifteen days in Southeast Asia and not do at least one overnight sleeper train. The train ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai is an ambling, twelve-hour ride through the Thai countryside. For about the same price you could fly which would take about an hour. But why would you want to do that?

Two weeks before we were scheduled to leave, we finally attempted to book the train tickets, but by then the first class berths were all sold out. These would have given us four-person cabins with doors that latched and locked. Instead, we booked second class tickets. The seats that were on either side of the aisle converted into one bed and then a hinged bunk from up above swung down into place. The porter came by and hung up green curtains that were designed to block out the lights and give us a modicum of privacy.

I think the train topped out at about fifty miles-per-hour and probably averaged about thirty. It should come as no surprise that the safety standards on a Thai train are a little different than The States or Europe. For my adventure-seeking brother-in-law, this meant he could descend the three steps leading out of the train car, hang on with one hand, and hold his camera with the other while getting pictures of the girls hanging their heads out of the window of the moving train car.

Try doing that on an airplane.