Mon 4th Dec – Wake Bangkok, Sleep Sukhothai

Waking in a country you’ve never been to before is an inimitable disorientation filled with elation. Because of self imposed jetlag (two valium at 4pm Sydney time on the flight), I woke up at 3am Bangkok time (7am Sydney). The immense want to start the day is thrilling. Dozing until 5.30am local time felt like a waste – Bangkok was just outside. But still, I dozed, and waited until 6am to walk out onto the streets.

I think I was in a backpacker part of Bangkok (or is that all Bangkok?) but it is still so different that there is endless stimulation. I was surprised to find all shops outside shut – reasoning that because it is backpackers, perhaps they stay up very late and open late? A strange city unfurling for the morning.

The streets were full instead with stray dogs and cats, food vendors walking their carts down streets heavy with cars, families packed together on a single moterbike (no helmets, mum steering with one hand and mobile raised to her ear in another). The smell is quientessentially South East Asia – in it lingers the debris of street meats and the humid human stench of sweat and sewage.

A large chunk of today is the train ride from Bangkok to a station close to Sukhothai. The travel time is scheduled for five hours, but close to an hour is spent on the track while engineers tinker on the train in the beating sun. Absolutely no one on the train is concerned or asking questions, no announcements are made, and I get the sense random delays in the country side are commonplace. The train begins in an industrial wasteland as it departs Bangkok, and transitions into shanty towns on the fringes of the city. A wide berth of country side follows, which is then swallowed by endless rice patty fields. Everywhere there are hunks of rusting steel, planks of decaying wood and entire warehouse structures left to rot and ruin. The only break from this is in the flooded rice patty fields, where it is a shock to see a human raking among the flocks of wetlands birds. I am on a train. I am in Thailand.