Riding the Iron Horse

I couldn't wait for late noon of this Sunday to arrive. It had not only to do with my enthusiasm about the train ride: it was again so hot... but I guess everyone will be bored by now when the word "heat" appears...
So I took a Tuk-tuk to the station and waited for the train to depart. With open windows I enjoyed then again landscape, rice paddies, mountains and forests, the humid heat streaming in, towns and villages we were passing... I described train rides in Thailand already in one of the first posts, the tour from Bangkok to Nong Khai. This time we started at 14.50 h, so almost five hours we drove in daylight. I simply can't imagine travelling in a closed air-con carriage, with locked and insulated windows, with a temperature probably colder then moderate, as long as there are other possibilities...
We arrived in Bangkok early in the morning, it was dawning, the city wasn't fully awake yet. I hadn't slept a lot, because of course it was noisy with the windows open, but what the hell... I only hope that there are more opportunities for me in the future to ride one of these trains again...

If you would like to get a taste of it, you can find some magnificent books about train travels: Paul Theroux's "The old Patagonia Express", in which he describes his journey from his home town (Boston? Chicago? I don't remember...) down to Patagonia, most of it in trains. A very interesting account of meeting people and getting to know other countries... From the same author is " Riding the Iron Rooster", about travelling through China by train (this one I haven't read yet...). The dutch writer Cees Nooteboom describes a journey by train, in Senegal (or Gambia?), in his wonderful collection of short travel stories "Nootebooms Hotel". There are certainly more books and stories available... But the best still is to do it on his own, isn't it?