The train from Bangkok to Surat Thani clacks along on slightly misaligned rails as the bustling city gives way to pastoral country side. The concrete jungle is replaced with rice paddies and palm groves, lotus ponds and coconut palms. The grey, smoggy, diesel scented streets become packed red dirt roads and fences dripping with flowers. The smells are sweet and tropical in the mid morning heat. 

I love to travel by train.

There is something slightly surreal about watching the world through a big glass window, an observer instead of a participant: Men with their pants legs rolled up and wide cone shaped hats bent over their fields, big funny paddle wheel implements of some sort being pushed through the wet paddies and women walking on the roadside with children on their backs. Long necked white fishing birds stood poised on one leg in the rice paddies, hunting some prey unseen to me, cows with big velvety humps between their shoulders foraged along the tracks and ran, startled, at the sound of the whistle as big, doe eyed water buffalo chewed their cuds, ankle deep in muddy, red-brown water. Deep green jungly rain forests alive and wriggling with vines of all sorts in every possible shade of green covered the sides of jutting mountains who looked, for all the world, like they’d been startled from their bed rock in the middle of the night during some sleepy epoch long since passed. They rose so quickly that they didn’t even ruffle the blanket of sea that surrounds them.

The train itself was a 1950’s era car with big, wire caged fans down the center aisle ceiling that oscillated in big circles. It was almost air conditioned. It really wanted to be air conditioned. At least it wasn’t hot.

The antique style air whistle punctuated my reverie and I felt as if I was in an old black and white train movie with the usual cast of characters: The efficient, bustling conductor, punching tickets and making announcements. The dreamily perfect English family with sweet as pie children bouncing on their knees. The slightly melancholy backpackers who keep to themselves. The black eyed, tea-with-milk skinned local woman with a purple orchid pinned in her hair. The German. And, of course, the slightly sinister older man who kept to himself but seemed to watch everyone.

The kids snacked on chocolate dipped cookies and peanuts, reading, sleeping and coloring by times. Elisha kept the English kids giggling. Tony worked. I wrote an article that’s due this week, journaled, wrote post cards and dozed a little when the rocking of our carriage kept time with the music on my ipod. 

Tonight we’re in Surat Thani, after taxis and tuk-tuks and the usual rodeo. It’s a one night stop, long enough for Tony to do a midnight conference call with the east coast of the USA. Tomorrow we’re on to Khao Lak, by bus, we hope, and a few days in the first place that’s a candidate for our home base in Thailand.