5 August 2018, Sunday
Today, I’ll be making my way down south to Hat Yai, the largest town in the Songkhla province of Thailand, close to the border of Peninsular Malaysia. With each journey, I am inching ever closer to home. My overnight train will only depart at 3:10pm, so I still have the morning free to roam around Bangkok for one last time.
After consuming my breakfast at the hostel, I headed out at 10:10am and walked to MBK Center. I wasn’t planning to buy anything but came here just to window shop. I soon saw a shop making customised baseball caps for 400 Baht (S$16.80) and they looked quite cool, so I was tempted into making one.
I was running low on cash so I went to the ground floor to exchange more currency. Unlike most shops, this particular one I went to did not require me to produce my passport. I exchanged S$100 for 2,386 Baht, i.e. an exchange rate of 100 Baht = S$4.20.
While waiting for my cap to be ready, I browsed around and ended up buying another T-shirt with a print depicting the Great Wave off Kanagawa. I simply love that image. The T-shirt set me back a further 220 Baht (S$9.24), and I decided that I really had to stop shopping.
At 11:55am, I picked up my cap, but it didn’t turn out to be as nice as I envisioned it. Sad. After that, I went to Siam Paragon and the other nearby malls for a quick stroll before having lunch at a café near my hostel. My iced latte and basil chicken rice cost 165 Baht (S$6.93).
At 1:45pm, I booked a Grab Car (109 Baht/S$4.58) to take me to Bangkok Railway Station, also known as Hua Lumpong railway station. This is the main terminal in Bangkok, with connections to all other parts of Thailand. The building had a beautiful half-dome façade, which reminded me of so many of the railway stations in Europe. It had been a while since I last travelled by train and I was missing it a fair bit.
I booked my train ticket through a website called thairailwayticket.com (click here). The ticket cost 945 Baht but there was a processing fee of 30 Baht, so I paid 975 Baht (S$41.31) altogether. They emailed me the ticket in PDF form and I had to print it out on my own, with the help of my hostel.
The distance from Bangkok to Hat Yai is about 940 kilometres and the train journey would take about 16 hours. I booked the Special Express train, departing Bangkok at 3:10pm and arriving at Hat Yai Junction at 7:20am the following day. It was going to be a long ride. However, nothing fazed me anymore because I had previously spent 92 hours, or four nights, travelling on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, so this was a piece of cake.
My ticket was a Class 2, coach type ANS40, lower berth bed. Lower berth costs slightly more than upper berth (around 100 Baht or less), but my previous experiences in Russia taught me that it is always better to get the lower berth bed. This is because firstly, lower berth is more convenient to move around – you don’t have to climb up and down.
Secondly, the space around the floor is part of your “territory”, for example, the small table by the window (if there is one) and the space under your seat/bed. So you get more space to place your things. Don’t be selfish, of course, but if you know you are carrying more stuff and need more space to store them, or if you need to use the table to work on your laptop, then it’s always good to choose the lower berth.
Lastly, as I will soon find out, the lower berth on this particular train is actually wider than the upper berth. So you are paying more because you really do get more inches on your lower berth bed.
The train number 45 was already at platform 3 when I arrived at 2:05pm. There was still an hour to departure but I didn’t have anything to do so I decided to board the train early. As I posed to take a photo with the train, I realised that it actually goes all the way to Padang Besar, which is the Thailand/Malaysia border. So if I wanted to save time, I could have just taken the train directly to Padang Besar, without stopping over at Hat Yai. However, I wanted to revisit Hat Yai because it had been close to two decades since my last visit as a child.
I boarded the train and made my way to my seat. As it was still so early, there were only maybe three other people on the train. This was unlike any of the trains I had taken before. Each seat was a single seat and they faced each other, with no table between them. The luggage racks were on the aisle and positioned perpendicular to the backrests of the seats, with metal step ladders on each side. The upper berths were not retracted yet.
Not long after I settled down, a train attendant came around. She inspected my ticket and told me that I was in the wrong carriage. I had never boarded the wrong carriage before! Embarrassed, I quickly gathered my bags and got off the train again.
When I eventually found my correct carriage and seat, I realised that it was better than the previous one. The seats were also facing each other but they were considerably wider, because there were no luggage racks along the aisle. Maybe the colours played a part too, because the grey seats and green floor here seemed more welcoming than the brown seats and grey floor in the earlier carriage.
At 3:11pm, the train moved off and we were on our way. The train was not full and no one occupied the seat opposite me, until much later at 11:45pm. The train moved very slowly while we were still within the city. At certain places, the zinc-roofed houses and buildings were built really close to the train tracks. The train even went on the road and the traffic had to stop to allow us to pass through.
Shortly after departing Hua Lumpong, train attendants came around to check our tickets. They did not check my passport because it was after all, a domestic train journey. Every now and then, vendors would come on board during the short stops and walk through the aisles to hawk their snacks and drinks. At 6pm, I bought a bento box of basil chicken rice from one of the vendors for 50 Baht (S$2.10). It was still warm and tasted quite good.
As I was finishing up my dinner, an attendant came around to set up the beds. It was fascinating to watch how he did it. First, he joined the two lower seats together to form a flat bed. Then, he used a wrench to unlock the upper berth bed, where the soft mattresses were kept, together with the sheets, blankets and aisle curtains. The way he did it was so smooth, especially how he spread the bed sheets. It was so slick it was sick.
With the beds fully made, I could now see that the lower berth was considerably wider than the upper berth. The lower berth also had a window view but the upper berth did not. So definitely, it was worth paying a little bit more for the lower berth to get more space and have a better night’s sleep.
After the beds were all laid out, it was the signal that it was time to retire for the night, even though it was still quite early. I laid against the backrest and listened to music while watching the Thai countryside zoom by. It was the end of another day, and I was one step closer to returning home.
