Rail Travel - Part 2 13.04.10

Travelling by train in many countries is, for me, a slightly embarrassing experience. The discomfiture is a sort of sympathetic reaction to the indignity that one is witness to. It seems that most people focus their attention, when presenting a public face – property-wise that is, on the front of their dwellings. So rail lines, which often proceed through the backs of properties and in the tangled and neglected public marginalia that most people don’t spend time or imagination upon, give us visual access to the arse end of things. To put it crudely, it’s like inadvertently glimpsing someone’s soiled underpants. At once one wants to turn away but the damage is done.

As we travel from Surat Thani, winner of the 2004 Homeliest City in Thailand Dingy Award (see Facebook entry soon to be published) , we pass countless rural and urban properties. There is a kind of sameness and a kind of uniqueness to each one. The cast of props includes but is not exclusively: very large jars which are cisterns used for holding potable (?) water – they are of Scheherezadian proportions; each one would hold about 15 thieves and a donkey or an Aladdin. There are usually four to six of these at the front or side of the house . There is a clump of fruit bearing trees either at the side or back – commonly coconuts or bananas but we have seen mangoes and tamarind (I think). There will be laundry on a line or frame somewhere, a bench, a smoking fire – perhaps a steel drum barbecue or a rusted metal box. The house might be mean – woven thatch or coco leaf walls on 8 foot poles of stripped tree or they might be fancier – stuccoed block or brick with bright green or pink walls and white trim. Dogs will be lying in the precious shade, often in clusters – they seem to like each other’s company – and who doesn’t? We will roll on past these iterations of domesticity.

There are an extraordinary number of people in Asia. This will sound absolutely banal to some of you but I am constantly struck by the number of people. Everywhere. People and people and people. There are incredible numbers of kids. Babies in hammocks, infrants sandwiched in between parents on motorscooters. toddlers squatting in the dirt and babes hanging on to mom or dad or grandmom. children by fires, youngsters by cisterns, kids chopping sticks with machetes, kids kicking dust at other kids. Kids on their way to school and on their way home. Kids trying to flog some useless book or set of postcards or trinket. Kids begging. The population of Asia is frighteningly huge. All along the rail lines we see families at their homely chores. It looks like some kind of Playmobile fiction or overpopulated Richard Scarry storybook it is all such a set piece. You might drive along a highway for an hour and not find a stretch of road longer than 300m that has no house on it. Usually houses are quite close to one another, not more than 50 feet, often less.

If you look carefully you will see people in almost every house. People sitting, reading, mending or tinkering, people resting, sleeping or pacing. Are the houses much more transparent? Yes, in a way because they are often open to the street. One can see into homes that are like little theatres where countless dramas are being played out every day, hour by hour. Perhaps it is not polite to look into a home but I have been doing so. I am fascinated by life here. Babies and men and women in their senescence and everything in between. The scenes are so human. Instead of saran-wrapped life in tight houses life flows out and around and spreads everywhere. I have hundreds of photos of people taken from tuk-tuks and buses, motorcycles and walking. I don’t know why I take them. I am trying to solve this feeling. Perhaps more about that in a later blog.

As we roll from rural to exurban to urban along the steel ribbon we begin to make more stops. It is still early day and people are lined up at crossings, waiting on their scooters and bikes and on foot. We begin to pass stations with large platforms filled with food stalls or selling other goods, each vendor offering pretty much the same as his or her neighbour. We see happiness and joy on faces but also fatigue and pain. It’s life, but nothing like ours in Canada.

Soon shanties and crude houses crowd right up to the track in places. Corrugated galvanized sheets are feathered together to make a shelter. We are moving along at reduced speed so for a split second you see a frame of people’s lives. They are often less than twelve feet away so there is a quality of intimacy despite the fact that their image is riffling by like playing cards. Snapshot Intimacy . A mnemonic token of retinal persistence. Dark and disorder is everywhere. Families are sitting at a simple breakfast, an old woman is stirring a black iron pot over a charcoal brazier. You smell food and coalsmoke hanging in the air. The smells flicker by too. Garlic, oil, lime, meat, smoke and spice.

The walls are scabbed together wood, plastic sheeting, vinyl signs with torn images of politicians? Actors? Smiling babies. Proclaiming something. Selling something sometime in the past, now providing shelter from sun, rain, wind, dust. Glass windows are uncommon; as often as not they are broken shards of glass in reclaimed windows kluged into the chaotic walls. These people live with trains in their lives. In waking, sleeping, argument, celebration, illness and childbirth there are trains clacking, squeaking, thundering by at intervals possibly known to them in body memory. The western mind (mine) thinks: germs, spoiled and rotten food, flies, disease.

Blaring light and what seems like silence in comparison to the fierce aural reflection of the shanties. Space suddenly leaps open and we are 30 metres from newish concrete block buildings. Leprous jigsaw sheaths of gaudy laundry, antennae, dead plants, piles of plastic bottles, junk. Dead vines hang like discarded fisherman’s nets from the crazy musical staff of electrical wires stretched approximately from pole to pole. We return to a shanty town but this one has been mauled by something. All the houses adjacent to the track are levelled, or nearly all, somehow some residents have resisted the bulldozers for now. They cook or launder, sweep the rubble from here to there for God’s sake - or idle in their half-ruined homes as if nothing unusual had happened. We see rebar and wood forms, they are building some aerial pathway here – will it be another Skytrain or another Rama superhighway? Bangkok has horrible traffic problems but they are fighting to modernize, trying to peg lengths of highway into the old matrix. Curiously, though the dwellings are demolished the ubiquitous temples - the votives house that grace every dwelling no matter how humble, where each family offers gifts of fruit, juice, sugar, candy, flowers or incense - are still standing, so amid the rubble and wrack there is a golden, red, green or white pagoda, resplendent by comparison. What do the Gods make of this desecration? Is it superstition, custom or respect that prevents the wreckers from demolishing these proxy houses?

Slowly grinding into the Bangkok Train Terminal. It is right out of the Leninist Russia – once noble or at least with a conceit of grandeur it too has rusted and carbonized and looks kind of lethal – tetanus and trench mouth. Gotta get out of this town. The redshirts are rioting we are told (mostly by our relatives). In fact its pretty quiet here but we want out. Out to the other side, to Cambodia, Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. It seems logical to book a train passage rather than try to go a klick or two to the bus station in morning rush hour. Next instalment: Don’t Take the Train to the Cambodia Border.