Eastern and Oriental Express

For those who have read the account of Kev & Jen's trip to see us, you may want to skip this entry.

Last week, Eric's brother & sister-in-law came to visit us here in Thailand. We met up in Bangkok and took the train down to the beach, Hua Hin. We had decided on Hua Hin because it's a good place for families, fairly inexpensive and the train to get there is about 160B/per person (about $4). Hua Hin was very nice, but the train trip wasn't exactly luxurious. The train compartments were completely open to the air, which at this time of year, was quite nice. However, much of the trip, we travelled at about 30 miles per hour. What was supposed to have been a 3 hour trip dragged on and on. Each time I asked the conductor how much farther we had to go, he'd say, "One more hour". We finally arrived 3 hours late. We felt bad about it because Kev & Jen had just finished the 24 hour flight to Thailand and we reassured them that the sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiangmai that we had already booked had always been reliably on time.

Famous last words. About 7:00 am we woke to find that the train had stopped. After about 45 minutes I asked a passing conductor why we were stopped. He responded that the train was broken down and we wouldn't be able to leave for at least 3 hours, maybe 4 or 5. Our 12:00 arrival time was changed to 5:00. We were in the mountains with only a small village in sight. About 15 minutes later the conductor came back to say that they had contacted a songthaew driver to take us to the nearest town with a bus station. Looking out the window, we weren't too excited about getting of the train. On one side we'd have to cross a rickety, thin bridge on the other, we'd need to climb down a steep hill covered with brush. In addition to our luggage, which was a lot, since Kev & Jen had brought us two large suitcases of things from America, we also had a four-year-old and a 2-month-old. Kev & Jen chose the rickety bridege and we chose the hill. Safely on the other side we climbed into a songthaew that was at least 30 years old. It moved faster than it looked able to and we arrived in town about 20 minutes later. At the bus station, we could see that getting out of the town wasn't going to be easy. We were in a small town in the mountains that didn't have many buses come through. In addition, there were about 100 backpackers who had gotten off the train before us and had reserved all the earliest buses. It was beginning to appear that five hours late on the train would have been faster. Thankfully a few Thai people we met on the songthaew decided to rent a van and invited us to join them. Thankfully, we got back to CM only an hour after our scheduled arrival time.

At the train station in Bangkok we saw the train we should have taken. The Eastern and Oriental Express looked like a train straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. Beautiful wood and soft lighting filled the train. It had the gleam of careful maintence that our train unfortunately didn't have. Sadly, at $1000 a ticket, I don't think we'll be taking it.