To Bangkok

I'm sitting in an unlit car in a hospital-green train while men in military uniforms shine lights in people's eyes while pounding beer and spinning their holstered guns on the pockmarked tables. Five cars ahead, my stuffed dog is guarding a bunk insistently set up at 7:00 PM. Just next to me, a window large enough to dive through while wearing a sousaphone flashes with the passing nocturnal countryside—silhouetted palm trees, rubber plantations, the periodic building, and a passing train sends a tornado through the car.

I'm enroute to Bangkok from Nakhon via Surat Thani. Someone recommended taking a minivan to ST because there are more departures and cheaper fares; NST has two per day and they take the long way around the peninsula to get to the main N-S line. Sure, you drop a hundred baht on the minivan, but you save a few hundred more and about 7 hours of travel. Plus, I figured I would get to see another city, and that's always a plus. I told myself.

It was a good lesson in doing proper research.

Night train to Bangkok

Suppose the departure time mattered and getting there was important: the train left NST at 1430 or 1530, I don't quite recall, and a ticket would've been 660 with an arrival at 0515.

The noon minivan left NST at 1245 for my farang rate of 150, not 50, TB. It dropped the passenger load in a narrow sort of horrible alley somewhere in town: Surat Thani has the worst sort of dilapidated and eroded jungle rot and grime scabbing over the buildings, and the back alleys are just ugly. I was standing on the street/parking lot/sidewalk/garbage dump while the other passengers dispersed.

Eventually, a motorbike taxi driver came up. I had just set down my massive load—not that heavy, but I'm not in good shape to hoist it. I was trying to ask the slick ticket salesman how to get to the train station and trying not to see the farang surcharge putting the gloss in his hair. It was especially fun because he was not speaking English, period.

Right off, the mototaxi guy picked up what I was saying: “Oh, satanee rotfai, you go train. Two hundred baht.”

I almost didn't laugh—the 8K trip to my erstwhile digs was 40. Now it's 200 to the train station?

I pointed at passing songtau, and the mototaxi decided he'd track down a tuk tuk for me. For 200 B. Welcome to farang corner—arguing will only burn linguistic bridges and hike the price. So I sucked it up and followed the songtau driver.

Surat Thani is the port for THE party islands, and it has developed its exploitive tourist industry the way a horticulturist nurtures orchids. Every block has a travel agent or three, designer clothing, and the most ungenuine atmosphere I've seen since Naples: everything is for sale but nothing has a price. You're welcome to make an offer, but the only one that will be accepted is the “Special Rate” occasionally advertised.

In this town, I am a commodity. I am a fat, farang wallet waiting to be fleeced, petals of dollars falling from my pockets and waving around with my day-glo green cast.

How to define, to describe one's own inadvertent commodification? Perchance similar difficulties came about early in the sexual revolution: how to describe the abjectly belittling look of objectification?

It ended up being a twenty-five minute ride to the train, so I almost got over the driver kicking me out in the middle of a cloudburst of afternoon downpour.

And I was an eensy bit peeved that the next train was from NST: better to wait and take the next train, the one that'll arrive after sunrise, I told myself. Especially when the ticket agent went prattling off about something and charged me 760, cash, for my fare in a second-class aircon sleeper. So, o save a couple hundred and get there sooner with the bonus of seeing the next largest town in the province, or maybe the largest (which somehow glorifies it?) I was down just over 1K B and going to arrive an hour later, But I was in a corner. Welcome to farang country.

I had an hour-plus to kill, so it was time to walk around town: nothing to dispel my original impression, and plenty to instill gratitude for the unapologetic character of NST: it might be unfair, but it is more equitable in so being. Anywhere a farang goes in Surat Thani, expect to get raped.

My train was only 80 minutes late. While reading the travel guide, I realized that I just have no interest in visiting Bangkok. It's big, it's busy, it's expensive, it's commercial, it's wild shopping and foreign food and the sex trade and hells-yeah, full throttle on the debauchery! Or it's the ultimate in luxury and convenience and carries a matching price.

I just don't care. Mexican food? Great—the lard here is beautiful, so refried beans should be absolutely fantastic.

“He said the nachos were the most expensive single dish he'd ever eaten, but that they were completely worth it.” Nachos? Really?

And accommodation, well, places with descriptions that would send me running from the potential of roaches and crabs cost as much as an establishment that would send me running from its extravagance.

Do I really want to drop that kind of money on creature comforts so I can visit a meditation retreat and specialist medical care? How much is a night in the hospital? H1N1 be damned, maybe I'll check in.

Or I could just pass.

A few K north of BKK is a town with prices akin to what I'd pay and a pace along what I'm after. Done and done: I'll get to BKK around sunrise, stash my bag at the train station, find the wat that hosts retreats and fill out an application, find a hospital with a gastroenterologist and make an appointment, and beat it out of the bustle.

Okay, I'll confess: I would like to see a pingpong show, but such glorious debauchery hardly has appeal when one's blood isn't thick enough to properly circulate unless one's feet are elevated.

So I'm again the freakshow farang, now among a singing crowd of armned, drunken railway policemen. And boy is a laptop exciting. Good thing, too, bcause if the lights came on the attention would be on me and my cast, not the gadgets.

Take what you can, right? Especially when it's a victory, which you should probably accept without questioning, especially when such things are oddities to the point of remarkability.

At least enough time has passed for everyone to fall asleep.

Save for a preteen girl surreptitiously snapping my bunk curtain open and closed at passers-by, everyone was asleep. Mai pen rai, right? At least it's quiet (a couple of men having a heated debate while thumping Quar'ans justified the unexpected price of a berth in the aircon class). And save for the frequent stops and regular passers-by, I joined them almost all they way to the 6:00 wakeup, when one of the guys, considerably worse for wear than when I'd last seen him—cackling so merrily about the farang—came through slamming open the bunks.