Train from Surrathani to Bangkok

Trip Start Jun 13, 2005
1
16
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Trip End Jul 27, 2005


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Flag of Thailand  ,
Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Well... To begin, there was no luck with the aircon sleeper, so sweating it out in slum class, as they lovingly refer to the fan sleeper train, was our destiny. BUT, as always there is a benefit with travelling as the locals do. I traded seats with a young pregnant woman who was sitting with her young (4?) son and her mother. They didn't speak a word of english, so we communicated via a series of absolutely ridiculous hand gestures. Beth and i ended up therfore sitting facing eachother, directly across from the woman and her mother facing eachother (the boy hopped between the two). At one point i was eating a bag of chips (which of course i ended up not eating because they were some insane flavor that the picture and the thai on the bag didn't exactly convey to me immediately), and the bag had a couple of little trinkets for kids (holograms of something which looked like thai powerrangers), i recognizedthe little boy's t-shirt had these very same characters. So again, with the ackward hand gesturing, i asked the mother if he might like them, and she gestured yes. The boy fell immediately in love with me (and was apparantly giving beth dirty looks... haha buying young thai children's love). He late rcame up to beth and i, and shyly put forth a hand to each of us, in each had were 3 leechee fruits (you know the red strawberry looking guys with giant green spike/hair things all over them)... we accepted, because it would have been rude not to, but of course we couldn't eat them. Lots of smiling back and forth between us and our adorable thai family. 16 hours 100 degrees
16 hours 100 degrees
 Sleeping was as per usual in situations as these, not so restfull for me. Keeping your bag in bed with you, as soon as someone walks by you are awake... sleeping on the defensive i suppose. Also a weird bug that fell on me right before we went to sleep, and then i mentally blocked out the memory, but still no fun. But all in all, a good train trip. We got into the station at 5am. Beth got a dunken donuts breakfast sandwich, and we hopped on a tuk tuk to the khaosan to meet our travelagent to get our passports, visas and meet our bus to cambodia.

unfortunatly... the whole thai payphone thing was a bit beyond us. I know 'youve only got to be 1% smarter than the object you are trying to use', but does this factor in language barrier... i think not! Some boating place was open at this insane hour, and reluctantly helped us finally contact this man who worked for our travel company and lived above it, and after an hour of not being able to get a hold of him we finally did. He didn't seem to know what was going on, and was half asleep, and couldnt find our things. But he eventually woke up the guy who knew what was going on, and he quickly found our things and had us on our way.

Beth and i sat for an hour or so on the bench infront of the store ewaiting for the bus. We had the conversation about how different people deal with different situations, and how that can change over the years. For example, how i used to be a giant ball of stress, and my immediate response to crisis was irrational panic. Now i find myself to be the one sitting back like dad, telling myself and whomever i am with, that it will be what it will be, and we will deal with whatever it is. Who knows when this happened. Beth has these fears that she is always the one panicking, and she seems to link this with some defficiency in her character. But i explained to her that it isn't an absolutely natural trait, and you can't expect to automatically be immune to all of the insane things that happen when travelling like this, it takes time to train yourself to react in a certain way. She doesnt seem to realize that she has only had a couple of these 'hitting your breaking point' moments in over three weeks of travel in these places so far out of our comfort zone, and every time she has collected herself and taken care of business. She doesnt give herself enough credit. But i think eventually, in retrospect she will see how well she did.
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