Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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The 4.p.m. from Chiang Mai to Bangkok
The World's Slowest Express Maybe, But Still an Experience

Text & Images: Matt

The first time I did this trip was nearly twenty years ago - Chiang Mai to Bangkok, by the overnight express.

It was my first long train ride, certainly at night, and child as I was then I still remember the thrill of novelty of everything to do with it - Fold-up sleepers! Wow! Climbing a ladder to get into the upper berth! The smelly toilet with its funny views, not only out of the window, but down through the toilet to the racing track. Then again - that long darkness as we went through the Khuntarn Tunnel. It was on that trip I first felt the romance of long-distance train travel. And who needs the Orient Express? For the romance of travel, give me the train down to Bangkok any time, I thought then...and still do now.

But even if that was when I decided that train-riding was my first choice for travelling big distances, that was a long time ago and it's amazing how little rail travel I've got in since. As your average middle-class grown-up, my time's fully occupied by permanently busy schedules and an ever-increasing workload. Time to travel is hard to find. You can't escape the low-cost airlines nowadays: so much more convenient: checking-in, boarding, finding the seat, reading the paper. Then bang! You're 500 kilometers away in an hour.

But there's a price to pay for such development. I'm not talking about the low cost per mile yet more expensive than other forms of transportation, but all the sentiment about traveling. It's lost. Hedy West could never have written that timeless classic, 500 Miles. And though it's true there's also a famous pop-song, Leaving on a Jet Plane, that's really about the feeling before going up in the plane - not traveling on it.

Snaking up to Khun Tahn

So, with this latest trip Bangkok, and with a bit of time to spare, I decided to give the train a revisit, and the 4 p.m. from Chiang Mai was the one I chose.

According to the Thai State Railway Authority's categories, there are 'ordinary', 'rapid', 'express', and 'special express' trains to choose from. My opinion is that to get the true picture, you need to shift each of these categories down one or two levels to get a more accurate description. Hence, from the bottom up I'd class them as 'sluggish', 'normal' or 'slow' for the rapid, fast for the express and 'a bit faster' for the special. Since the 4 p.m. is officially a rapid train, it therefore turned out to be slow enough to watch the scenery and the sunset. (Oh, and by the way, take my advice and give the so-called Sprinter a miss. You get a better deal and greater comfort and just as good views from a decent tour-bus with its reclining seats: and the chance to sleep too, which is more than you can say sitting up all night in the Sprinter).

I hurried off work at three o'clock sharp and rushed to the station half hour early, so my partner and I had time to stroll around and pick up some food. Oh yes, I know well there's a dining car on the train, but again you can take my word that the State Railways dining car is specially designed for those who don't care what they eat. It seems to me the only real change that's taken place in the dining car over the last twenty years is that the price has gone up while the quality has remained down where it was in the past. So what did we get before boarding? Drinking water, some nibbles and a bit of fruit for the journey, and a meal right there on terra firma in dear old Chiang Mai. One thing you can be reassured about if you're a first timer: there's no starving around Chiang Mai Station. Whatever you want, pretty well, you can find it - in the restaurants, mini-marts, food and fruit vendors' stalls - much as it's always been. But there was a surprise this time. There's a bakery with real decent coffee, newly opened just across from the station itself.

Time to leave then. No-one yells 'all aboard', but they do use a bell that chimes loud and clear throughout the station. But guess what! You can hear this clanging bell all through the night too, at every station down the line. So if you can't lose it, you'd better love it. Clang! Clang! Clang! It's a slightly mournful sound but quite in keeping with train travel, it seems to me, a bit of the romance that hasn't been lost.

Well, onto our train we climbed, to find half the compartments crammed with backpackers and their big bags: bottles and special attachments dangling that almost blocked the small passage way.

At all events, off we went at four p.m. sharp. Bye-bye Chiang Mai! Don't cry, we'll soon be back. And as there were a couple of hours of sunshine, we could look out onto the rural landscape stretching away as far as the horizon, and as widely as our window allowed it to extend. And what a superb view! With air transportation, you get the scene of the clouds over the horizon, super boring. Traveling by overnight bus, all you get is the streetlights, occasional rushing headlights and almost nothing else. With this train, we got to see everything imaginable - the countryside, the woods, rivers, lots of buffaloes, cars lined up to the red light waiting for the train to pass by, a micro-light high-flyer over Lampang, and �and... Space. Room to breathe.

Now, unlike any protagonist in Dame Agatha Christie's novels, where no-one pees, I soon realized I needed to answer the call of nature so off down the carriage I went. Using public toilets can be a dreadful experience for some super-hygienic travelers. But compared with the average overnight bus where the toilets are straight out of Hieronymus Bosch, toilets in the train are a heaven apart. Each car has one or two of them, and in our car at least they came up to standard, almost without smell apart from the usual chemicals. And with toilet paper too, at least for the earlier part of the journey. The hard part though, was to try to stabilize your body to the swinging and the rocking of the rushing train. But you get used to it soon enough. In our carriage, and probably in the other ones too, one of the toilets was a w/c with a shower, while the second one was a shower alone, and one that functioned very well too. Now here you will benefit with a bit of experience, and possibly a word or two of Thai, because you need to ask one of the officials whether the water's still running. First come first served, as with everything else, and before not too long, the water all gets used up. So get in early if you want a good shower. I mean, suppose you've soaped up and are covered in foam and bubbles and then the water gives out. I ask you, what are you going to do?

Oh, and speaking of the attendants on the train, they are there to make your journey go smoothly, no hiccups. But they tend to be pretty busy - almost like maids in hotels, though they're usually males. Making up the beds is really a tough job - just watch them at it in the late evening, and early in the morning when the sun's coming up. Plus, these people speak English nid noi, well enough to tell you it's time to make your bed up and what the next station is. And later too, when the bottles are rolling and the young blades are getting quarrelsome it's they who have to deal with it. Yes. These are quite small guys. So, don't blame them if some of them look a bit disgruntled or dispirited because this sure ain't an easy job.

Hua Lampong

Anyway, rolling along out of Chiang Mai, over that familiar white bridge above a little river, then the long, slow, effortful climb up the intermediate mountain range bordering Chiang Mai and Lampang provinces. This is the part of the journey where you look out of the window and see the locomotive snaking up ahead of you, the forest pressing in either side and the wind getting colder on your cheeks as you climb, just as it did in childhood� and here we are at the famous Khuntarn Tunnel. It takes about 90 minutes to get here by train, so the National Park that stretches steeply up from the track here makes a great day trip, with bungalows at various levels that you can spend the night in if you're so inclined. The perfect get-away from the city, and even faster to get to by bus. There you are, lovely nature all around and so convenient. I strongly recommend it.

There's an amusing belief about this Khuntarn Tunnel. Chiang Mai people will tell you that anyone who comes up north for the first time and goes through it, is very likely to stay for good. In my case, this has proved to be true, so far at least. Well, I'm wondering what happens to those who make their first trip from Chiang Mai through the darkness of Khuntarn Tunnel down to Bangkok. My bet is that the charm of Chiang Mai is strong enough to resist the spell and make them come back again. What do you say?

As the train slithered its way down the wilderness that stands between the crest of the hills here and Lampang station, my partner got me to look at the valley outside the window. When I glanced downward, it gave me a thrill. It was as if the ground was gone, it fell so steeply - as if we were passing over huge abysses: as in fact we were, over the causeways that pass from one side of a gulch to the other, bridges without rails at all. Add to that the fact that the light is going fast by this time, so the wilderness looks like something out of the Brothers Grimm�.But still I couldn't resist clicking away, shooting at the void that lay below us

Soon though the sun set, and the darkness became visible and beyond the window there was only a reflection - a small boy looking back twenty years, and feeling as he would twenty years later. Thrilled, enraptured, time-travelling in both directions at once. How else can you explain it, that feeling?

Hua Lampong

Still Bangkok a long way away, and I and the train were in no hurry to meet it. In fact I wished the world would slow down to our pace, creeping peacefully onward. I learned something on this ride on the 4 p.m. to Bangkok. That I'd been missing something essential - something you can't experience in the hurried world of bulging schedules. The smell of a flower. A reflection in the window. A cloud on the horizon. The clang of the bell in Lampang station.

The thrill of the long night ride on the train to Bangkok.