Sleepless on the night train

Bangkok – Chiang Mai

My first experience of a night train and most certainly my last. As negative as that sounds as an opening sentence to this post, unfortunately it is too true. If you haven’t realised already, let me pre-warn you that unfortunately this will be a generally negative post.

I had been warned to expect the worst from my experience and I guess due to the fact that it is so inexpensive I can have few complaints. The train itself took 15 hours to go from Bangkok station to Chiang Mai from 10pm – 1pm the following day. Thankfully there were no screaming babies but, despite the fact that I had taken a valium at around 1am, sleep eluded me pretty much throughout. Alex Garland in his novel The Beach describes that the gentle rocking of the train makes it easy to sleep. I found this to be as far from the truth as possible and so I spent most of the night reading up on Chiang Mai and the Thai culture in general. Another thing that definitely made the journey less enjoyable was the fact that it was swarming with cockroaches and many mosquitos, which were being left dead in large quantities around me as they struggled to handle the anti-mosquito balm that I was wearing. I was swimming in a sea of dead, black dotted pests and I should really have taken a picture to emphasise this image. Having said all of this, being awake at around 5am, the train came to a stop for a 10 minute period in the middle of nowhere not long after I had the fortune of catching a brief sunrise over the horizon before we were hidden behind the mountains of the north. As we stopped I looked out of the train to see a beautiful, picturesque village with a handful of small homes and a small but also stunning ravine running through it, in the middle of huge forest. I can only apologise and emphasise the fact that I am the blogger and Jane is the photographer on this trip so, if you want anyone to blame for no images of this village, you should blame her (I think she was sleeping).

The final few hours were whittled down by watching the world go by as we saw the twin Peak Mountains of northern Thailand both arrive and disappear in our wake.

Beautiful scenery but please no more night trains.