The huge splash in the huge heat …
As the mercury reached the mid-30s C and the ‘genuine feel’ skyrocketed to more than 40C Songkran was back with a bang. You either enjoy it or loath it! As the joyful days heightened in passionate vitality the Scribbler discovered himself falling under the previous classification! However I confess I didn’t endeavor far, restricting myself to my recognized Chom Thian convenience zone. A number of soakings, welcome in the heat, quickly had me in the Songkran spirit. The days slipped promptly by culminating on Wan Lai in an extravaganza of a drenching, splashing, sousing grand ending symbolising the removing of the previous year’s miseries. Long might the custom grow!
Confessions of a train romantic …
Rail journeys have actually been main to the plot of many books and movies along with the topic of ratings of poems and paintings, and fired the creativities of authors varying from Tolstoy and Dickens to Buchan and Betjeman.
Although never ever most likely to reach anywhere near the ability of those skilled artists, as a fellow train romantic I share their enthusiasm! Being a train romantic is a million miles from the ordinary world of the “train spotter”. We romantics care little for locos, bogies and wagons. For us it is the environment, atmosphere and aura the train stimulates that we discover so fascinating. So with a fondness for trains and a love of the East rail journeys in Thailand satisfy 2 enthusiasms!
To the Scribbler, Bangkok’s 126 years of ages Hua Lamphong Station has actually constantly remembered a lost age of rail travel and holds an unique location in this train romantic’s heart. Now its long reign as the country’s train center is over. The glossy brand-new( ish) aluminium intercity reveals have actually deserted the old location in favour of the similarly shiny brand-new primary line terminus at Bang Sue. Now Hua Lamphong serves just regional traffic– benched and decreased rather like a when grand girl now residing in “decreased scenarios”!
Naturally the old station has actually long remained in high decrease. From what need to have been magnificence years in her very first couple of years of a long life she had actually degraded into a worn-out, in locations honestly unclean, shadow of her previous self can not.
Requiem for a grand old dame …
Oh Hua Lamphong, when grand and large
A terminus where memories last
For many years you stood a grand old dame,
A sign of the country’s train popularity.
No more the center of train land,
Your magnificence days, now at an end,
So now we need to bid adios,
To a treasured landmark, permanently real.
A train reminiscence …
Some 10 years ago among the Scribbler’s earliest transits through Hua Lamphong motivated him to compose this piece for my blog site ‘Idle Times in Restriction Somboon and Chom Thian’, www.theidlescribbler.wordpress.com
Reaching Hua Lamphong, the capital’s primary station, at the end of a seaside Christmas break at Chom Thian I excitedly expect my very first journey aboard Train 67, the over night ‘reveal’ sleeper from Bangkok to Sisaket. The 450 km journey will take more than 10 hours to cover. I’m undaunted at the possibility– another train experience is afoot!
Hua Lamphong is heaving. I select my method through the crowd to the Black Canyon coffeehouse on the upper floor gallery neglecting the station’s busy concourse, a place I have actually discovered to be a best individuals seeing perch.
Today the scene is among bustle tempered by Asian persistence. Monks, as befits their status, are supplied with their own personal and roomy seating location. No one, at any rate while I’m seeing, appears even to think about, never ever mind making, any effort at breaching this semi-sacred area.
The station clock reveals 6 pm exactly and all turmoil stops as the very first notes of the Thai National Anthem noise. Simultaneously all is still and quiet, even the most crazy train catchers drop in their tracks. Time is unexpectedly frozen as if somebody has actually struck the video time out button. As the last note passes away the buzz starts once again. Unlike the silence on Remembrance Day, which is softened by a prolonged accumulation, here the contrast from one minute to the next is significant.
Looking down on the busy scene listed below I attempt to think of how it would have searched in Hua Lamphong’s earliest days. Definitely no young ‘back-packers’ then. Any farang would likely be dressed in white ‘ducks’ and most likely sporting a ‘solar toupee’!
Train 67 at last appears on the departure board. I select my method through the crowd to the tracks. In the schedule Train 67 is called a ‘unique reveal’ although a typical speed of simply 40 km per hour reveal is possibly rather deceptive!
Aboard this reveal I might have taken a trip initially class with a personal compartment. Nevertheless, still playing the geriatric backpacker I choose to take a trip 2nd class air-con. To think of the train’s interior think old American films such as ‘Some Like It Hot’ where much the action occurs in the old ‘Pullman’ type sleeping vehicles. Train 67 is similar to that. Not long after departure the train team move down the vehicles turning the seats to beds, tidy cotton sheets and pillows in a mini bed room with cosy curtained-off personal privacy.
It’s a lot less expensive than by air and a hell of a lot more comfy than the most glamorous buses.
A megastar is gone …
As I compose news comes through of the death of that Australian comic genius with an unrivaled skill for satire and parody Barry Humphries, aka Dame Edna Everage, megastar homemaker from Melbourne’s Moony Ponds, aka Sir Les Patterson, the white wine drenched ‘Cultural Attaché’, aka Sandy Stone, the mild however somewhat senile Returned Serviceman. I’ll miss them all.
