Having taken for granted that every country would have some form of train travel, we were now hovering at the edge of a yawning gap in Asia’s railway network, unsure how to make the leap from Saigon to Siem Reap. Built for the purpose of trading rice, but blighted by a dark history, Cambodia’s 380 miles of tracks were first laid while under French rule. Between 1930 and 1942, the first line was constructed linking Phnom Penh to Bangkok in the north, and in the 1960s a second line connected Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville in the south. A third line between Phnom Penh and Saigon had been planned, which would have connected Vietnam and Thailand, but it was never built. The two lines had been used to ferry freight and a few passengers, but after Pol Pot captured Phnom Penh in 1975, the trains played accomplice to his genocidal regime, enabling the evacuation and relocation to the countryside of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians forced into hard labour that led to their starvation and eventual massacre. Even into the late 1990s, Khmer Rouge guerrillas saw the trains as ripe for ambush and attack, kidnappings and murders. After years of civil war and damage from exploding land mines, the railways fell into a state of disrepair. Trains regularly derailed, owing to neglect by the Cambodian government, and eventually they faded out of operation. However, not long after we visited, the line from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville was resurrected and a regular service put on for passengers.
Bridging the crossing by a series of buses, we arrived at Poipet and joined the queue of backpackers on visa runs. Hinging the two countries together, the place was a strip of no-man’s-land swarming with scammers, hustlers, conmen and touts. Surrounded by slums and markets, Poipet was marked out by a corridor of casinos, each more garish than the next, with a string of names like Holiday Palace, Grand Diamond City, and Star Paradise, as glorious and aspirational as their establishments were not. Gambling is illegal in Thailand and the casinos provide a legal outlet for Thais to pour in and lose their money at craps and roulette, and for Cambodians to find employment. Trudging up the strip past the scammers, hustlers and touts – the conmen had bee-lined for the Europeans – we crossed over the friendship bridge to Thailand, had our passports stamped, then squeezed into a tuk-tuk that took us up the road to Aranyaprathet station, a pretty wooden building with picket fencing and an assortment of preened and potted bushes.
Boarding a train at its origin brought with it a position of privilege. While it was fun to hop on and off along a route, I always felt like I was arriving in the middle of a story, wondering what I’d missed, and who had warmed my seat. Now, as Jem and I sat in the carriage, balancing two boxes of fresh pad kra pao on our knees, I was ready for the story to begin. The train had basic wooden interiors with padded seats, and the walls featured adverts for shower gel and ketchup. Metal shutters were pushed down into the window frames allowing a breeze to carry in the aroma of stir-fried basil from the ramshackle restaurant by the station. Looking around and sizing up our travelling companions, I saw a crop of carefully tended hair moving in my line of vision, and I strained to look over the top of the seats to where an elderly Indian man was sitting next to a young Thai woman carrying a bag of bottles and cans. Like most Indians who spotted one another on holiday, there was instant curiosity, followed by immediate hostility, and Mr Walia took one look at me peering from my seat, before ignoring me completely and continuing his conversation with the passenger opposite him.
‘You’re really seventy?’ remarked a quiet male voice, which sounded American.
‘I know,’ he boomed. ‘Look at my passport, you’d hardly believe it, would you?’
Mr Walia had styled his hair into a Bollywood bouffant, and dyed it an interesting shade of maroon, a hem of white around his forehead. I could believe he was seventy.
‘I tell you, our bodies are like sewers,’ said Mr Walia, shaking a finger. ‘Detoxify, drink beet juice, and don’t have chemo!’
A young boy leapt onto the train clutching a chicken leg and a bag of sticky rice, and looked around for a place to sit. Spying an opportunity to move within earshot of Mr Walia, I offered the boy my seat, and sat with my back to the conversation, sinking low against the berth. A hoot rang out, followed by a comical ding-ding, and the train began its journey to Bangkok. Over the rumble of the wheels, I realised Mr Walia had gone quiet, and was forced to look elsewhere for amusement – which didn’t take long after a mother pulled out an industrial-sized nail cutter, yanked her son’s leg across her lap, and began clipping his toenails. Usually heartened by the way in which Asians refuse to distinguish between home and public transport – turning berths into dining tables and saris into cradles – I was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure by the shards pinging around the seats. Applying make-up and combing hair in public were just about tolerable, but beautification that resulted in the depositing of human debris was a step too far. No one cared though, most passengers staring out of the windows at the herons picking their way through waterlogged fields. It was a humid but grey day, the sogginess of the ground and air merging into one as we rattled our way west. Rain soon hit the sides of the train, drumming the roof as passengers scrabbled to pull up the shutters. Swapping to the other side of the carriage, I shifted along to the window and leant out, enjoying the warmth of the summer rain and the dull smell of wet soil.
In my new seat, I was now diagonally opposite Mr Walia’s interlocutor, a waif of a man with sunken cheeks, wearing a checked shirt and a vintage army cap. He had curled himself into the furthest corner of his seat and was gripping the window ledge like a lost child.
‘I’m always willing to try different things,’ he said, his eyes darting across wild grass that was almost as high as the train.
‘The best thing is you take care of yourself. You live a good life on the outside, and your body will be healthy on the inside. Chemotherapy is just chemicals again. It is chemicals that destroy your body in the first place!’
‘What would you suggest I try?’
Interested to hear the extent of Mr Walia’s oncology expertise, I leant forward. Seeing my face, he declared he had a headache and closed his eyes, as the woman began rubbing his temples. The American pulled out a jar of tiger balm from his knapsack and offered it to Mr Walia, who opened one eye and looked at it as though he had just been gifted a turd in a box.
‘We’re herbalists,’ he said, as the woman produced a similar-sized tub of balm. ‘We’ve tried them all, and we make our own. You won’t find anything like this on the market.’ The woman, who turned out to be Mr Walia’s wife and business partner, unscrewed the lid and explained that the balm contained honey, turmeric and pepper, and began rubbing it along his legs, which apparently were the source of his headache. ‘But I can sell you whatever you need. I assure you, it can fix any ailment.’
A wonderful aspect of travelling by train is the transactional relationship between passengers who feed off one another, picking up tips, offering advice, guarding each other’s belongings, and generating a trust that is unique to railway travel. But this trust is not to be abused. Like a masonic handshake, these on-board interactions are understood to be for the benefit of all concerned. Mr Walia was a traitor to the cause. If the cure for cancer lay among the contents of my spice rack, I’d willingly have massaged his legs myself.
Having heard enough, I moved back to where Jem was sitting with his legs crossed, now chewing chunks of sticky rice and sweet pork that he’d bought from a woman with a bucket and a limp. In spite of his Malaysian background, Jem’s supremely white-centric, Surrey upbringing had played a key role in cementing his stiffness and politesse. Whereas most people left their comforts at home, it was a joy to watch him relaxing into his true comfort zone as he found affinity, rather than strangeness, in his surroundings. Until now, the longest train journey he’d ever endured was between King’s Cross and York, yet he was more than happy to pass hour after hour on trains where the likelihood of derailment was far higher than that of arrival, and where there was no more entertainment than that which was sourced on board.
Our train was already delayed. New track had recently been laid, and the train had been slowed down to give the sleepers time to settle, which also gave us time to take in the sight of burning potato fields and apple-green rivers dotted with the heads of kids bobbing up to the neck. The train clanked along as we hung over the window ledges watching local train stations sail by. With names like Khokmakok and Bandongbang, they looked like private cottages surrounded by potted palms and landscaped gardens. Each station was painted red and white, featured life-sized portraits of the king, and was hung with a large gold bell that bonged three times as we departed.
A couple of hours later, a curve of white moon appeared in the corner of the sky, waiting for the sun to take leave. The last light fell on pink lotuses floating in the dirt, and a chill crept along the floor of the carriage. More than eight hours after we had set off, the train picked up pace and began to canter into the city, which greeted us with the stench of open sewers, rotten bananas and fish. Flyovers twisted overhead, and the orange glare from lamp posts swept through the train like a searchlight. Billboards warned not to buy Buddha heads, next to adverts for Canon – Delighting You Always! Mr Walia was now awake, combing his hair and ranting about private hospitals. Sliding his comb back into his breast pocket, he stretched out a hand to his wife who reached into the carrier bag and cracked open a can of Black Panther extra premium stout that she passed across to him. Feeling sorry for her, Jem struck up a conversation and asked her how we could continue from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur.
‘It’s better you take the train to Batawat,’ she said, her toes scrunching in silver sandals as the wind intensified, blowing dust through the shutters.
‘Batawat?’
‘Yes, from Bangkok Hua Lamphong station you take the train to Batawat on this side,’ she said, gesturing to the left. ‘This other side is very beautiful, but it is not safe.’
There were two train lines that could take us down the country to Malaysia: one was a straightforward route down the west coast, the other a jungle route down the east coast that was infinitely more beautiful, but a hotspot for separatist violence – which made it oddly alluring. A few months earlier, Thai rebels had bombed a section of track between Yala and Sungai Kolok, which was the exact route on which we would travel, but I conceded that as much as I would have liked to gather stories of adventure, I wanted to live to tell them. Thanking Mrs Walia, we gathered our bags as the train slowed into Bangkok Hua Lamphong. Outside the station, we flagged down a tuk-tuk and swung off into the traffic just in time to see Mr Walia getting into a taxi, his wife standing on the kerb with their bags.
Khao San Road was every grubby tale about Thailand packed into one street. Reeking of sticky cocktails and desperation, it was a magnet for gap-year students, stag parties, and sexless creeps in their fifties looking for massage parlours, hostels, cheap eats, cheap clothing and cheap beer. You could pick up everything on Khao San Road, from tie-dye T-shirts and skewered scorpions, to henna tattoos and herpes. Having spent my own gap year teaching English at a high school in Cannes, I’d bypassed this particular rite of passage and first travelled to Bangkok in my late twenties to visit my friend Jane. We’d spent two hedonistic weeks reading books and playing Scrabble, and had even stayed up past midnight one night, much to the confusion of everyone around us who swiftly gave up trying to offer us drugs, get into our knickers or sell us Full Moon party buckets, concluding we were lesbians or nuns in training. Determined to avoid the debauchery of a Friday night on Khao San Road, I took Jem to a comparatively sedate bar nearby that served the same delicious chicken massaman curry as I remembered, and watched as he absorbed the bedlam. Until now, Jem had never picked up a backpack, let alone owned one, and his holidays had usually involved family trips to the same resort in Antigua. Keen to see Bangkok in all its fabled glory, he finished his curry, and the two of us walked around the centre of town watching skinny posh boys dribble after tanned girls with braids.
Perched on a plastic stool, I sipped an iced coffee and observed the scene around a hawker setting up a push-cart of fried bamboo worms, crickets and grasshoppers, their bodies glistening beneath the light of his hurricane lamp. Gathering with curiosity, his customers comprised Western tourists taking selfies, goading one another into machismo. Across the road, a line of waiters wearing white cycling shorts and headbands strutted among the tables, blowing kisses to their regulars. All around, the Thais were performing, putting on accents, batting their false lashes and playing to the crowd. In the ten years since I’d last visited, the area had changed for the worse. Free wi-fi was so widely available now that the internet cafes had vanished and been replaced by more bars selling cheap cocktails. Wanting to stay at the heart of the action, Jem had insisted we book into a hostel a few streets away from Khao San Road; we arrived to find the staff sitting on the floor watching Liam Neeson films on a loop. Making our way up to bed as our neighbours were on their way out, we wrestled open the door, breaking the lock in the process.
‘You know that hostel is only a few letters away from hovel?’
‘Ha, bloody ha,’ said Jem, grimacing as the door swung open. ‘It’s not that bad.’
Bundling the sheets off the bed, I spread out our sleeping-bag liners and lay on my back, stretching my arms so as to reach both sides of the wall, which were splattered red.
‘Okay, it’s quite bad,’ Jem called from the bathroom, where a family of cockroaches had gathered around the drain as though attending a funeral. Hoping to wash them back to where they’d come from, Jem picked up the shower hose and found the head was missing, a pair of feelers waving from the open pipe.
‘I think that’s where they came from.’
Now convinced that if he left up the lid a python would swim up the toilet, Jem placed his washbag on top, and attempted to close the window to shut out the shrieks and screams, and what sounded like alternate gun shots. I crawled into bed, trying not to touch too much and waiting for him to realise that the window wasn’t even open. Jem put his hands over his ears as the lights from a nearby bar flashed across our ceiling.
‘How the hell are we supposed to sleep through this?’
‘It’s Bangkok. You don’t sleep at night. You stay out until the morning then sleep through the day.’
‘Okay, we can stay at the Peninsula next time.’
Staring up in the dark, we lay side by side in the silent realisation that we’d finally reached that point in life when the thought of slippers and Netflix was more exciting than a drunken night out.
Considering her choice of husband, we’d had little reason to trust Mrs Walia’s judgement, but went ahead and booked tickets from Bangkok to Batawat – or ‘Butterworth’ as the ticket vendor had corrected me, laughing at my writing and showing it to his colleague, who had laughed and shown it to everyone in the office. Looking down at the tickets, I saw that Train 35 was known as a ‘Special Express’, and was immediately suspicious about what made it so special. As vague and noncommittal a term as ‘Limited Express’, it had the potential to be the best ride of our lives, but also the worst.
‘Perhaps it’s like special fried rice, full of exciting things you weren’t expecting,’ I said, trying to look on the bright side.
‘Or full of leftover bits that nobody wanted.’
Still annoyed by the previous night’s stay, Jem was in no mood for pleasantries. With no television of our own, we’d lain awake listening to the staff watch Taken, followed by Taken 2, falling asleep before they’d started Taken 3. After a roadside breakfast of roast duck and a pineapple smoothie, we’d walked up Khao San Road to visit Wat Chana Songkhram temple, skirting around the posh boys who were now sitting in the gutter, their Oxford shirts damp with moonshine and vomit. The July heat had already reached intolerable levels by the time we’d taken an air-conditioned taxi to the station, after discovering they were cheaper and faster than tuk-tuks, and didn’t involve swallowing mouthfuls of filth and fumes.
Happily, we had no reason to
worry about the train to Butterworth. The Special Express trains were speedy, long-distance services that provided only first- and second-class air-conditioned sleeper berths – the top tier of Thai railways. Boarding just before 3 p.m., we found ourselves sitting next to Joe, who was hugging a satchel to his chest, and looking from the floor to the ceiling fan as it whirred hot air around the carriage. At the age of sixty-five, Joe was about to take his first-ever train journey. Having just retired, he had decided to treat himself to a week visiting old friends in Bangkok, and had flown up from Penang, booking his return journey on the train. Fishing a tiny Pentax from his breast pocket, Joe slid over to the window and put one hand to the glass, his eyes following the billboards, rusty rooftops and washing lines, as they slid past in a kaleidoscope of metal, cloth and colour. As a child growing up in Borneo, Joe had cycled to and from school, taking buses between cities, buying his own car when he could finally afford one. Somehow train travel had passed him by. Watching Joe take pleasure in the unremarkable way the bunks pulled down or the lights switched off, I was reminded of why my passion for train travel deepened every time I boarded a train. No matter how many journeys I took, or how awful the train, each one brought an element of surprise or wonder, usually to be found in the least expected places and people.
In just under an hour the train had shaken loose the city and relaxed into the countryside. Lakes of flooded paddy were marked out by footpaths and bendy palms that crossed at the waist like hastily scribbled kisses. A haze of mountains sat on the horizon, nudging the underbelly of the clouds, summer storms greying their tops. As the afternoon blurred into evening, unread books lay face down on sleeping chests, and I crept out of the carriage to thaw out in the vestibule. There was no happy medium with Asian air-conditioning: it was either broken or cranked up to fridge-cold, imploring passengers to layer on jumpers and socks. Standing on the hinge of the two carriages as they slid around, clashing against each other, I peered through the rubber edges, basking in the heat that rushed through. Soft light fired the paddy, turning the lakes to liquid caramel, the palms silhouetted like black windmills. The view moved with me, offering itself up and allowing me to draw in as much as I needed, for as long as I wanted, before I stepped away, sated.
Around the World in 80 Trains Page 7
