Train Ride to Chiang Mai: Do Not Do It!

Express Day Train To Chiang Mai

Notice the wobble of the picture and then imagine 14 hours in that wobble.

First do not eat the free, train stewardess served custard stuffed sweet buns that we hoped were a well preserved food thing, like a Twinkie. Seriously do not do it! I only needed one bite to realize this; Tom needed three buns and 12 hours. Westerners should not eat these things…ever. Why? Because you will be sick…in bed…on drugs, many… as Patty types away on our ‘vacation’ blog…worried. And then too, after 12 hours of severe back and forth train rocking, something like a boat ride (in by the way a gorgeous green sea of rice paddies and jungles) that never seems to stop, it will get dark and the reason for getting on the bloody train will go black and if you are prone to seasickness, which many of you know Tom really, REALLY is, then you will suffer, as he did for 2 ½ hours just as your stomach asks you, “Why the fuck did you eat the strange yellow custard buns” that again, everyone together now, “No Westerner should ever eat!”

And oh my god, if all this is not enough to make you so glad you are at home, working 9 to 5, well then there is this: cockroaches. Even after your (that’s right, I’m still in third person and I am staying here for this post, OK) best efforts to accept them as a ‘necessary’ living thing (like reading novels called “Kockroach” and spending nail biting time at the San Francisco Natural History Museum observing their live exhibit on tropical horrors), you will fail miserably to accept any of this good Karma crap as twilight approaches and suddenly the slight crack in the wall where you sit becomes the main gated entrance for the space inside the train walls where these horrible hard body, jam interior creatures with probing awful staring antennas come out and ask, “Where are those custard filled buns that you idiots ate” as you sway back and forth way too slow on the ‘express’ train to Chiang Mai with bathrooms that I simply do not have any breath left to relive.

Are we on vacation or did the plane actually crash and we are in purgatory? The answer in our next blog: Chiang Mai, Escape from Purgatory.