The vacation is over, it's time for the trip to start

I think that I don’t sleep well in transit because I don’t want to miss out on the any of the experience. So much of life’s importance for me comes out of the journey that often the destination is an afterthought. The natural result of this is a general lack of sleep when there is anything else that could be done, which more often than not is always.

As I currently write this I am sitting on a sleeper car on a train from Surat Thani to Bangkok. The current time is 2:41am and the temperature in my bunk is 28C. Our train left around 5pm and will arrive (assuming it’s on time) in Bangkok at 5:15am. My total sleep thus far has been maybe an hour. That’s enough with the stats.

This is the first time I will be writing a blog out by hand first. It is a somewhat different experience and one I think that I will try to do more often as I like the subtle difference in the way I think.

Being on a train now it almost feels like my trip has finally started. This may seem like an odd concept three weeks into the adventure but for some reason knowing that at the end of the day you are still staying on a beach changes the general feel of the trip. It makes you feel lazier, and although I’ll be the first person to admit it was needed, I can only be lazy for so long before I start to go crazy.

It’s interesting how your perspective of normal changes depending on where you are. Along with this of courses is what you consider ‘safe’. We had a rather amusing taxi ride the other day for example. I think because we were from a country that drives on the right side of the road he wanted to make us feel at home thus did the same. If something like that happened in Canada we would have all been scared witless. Riding on a dirt road in the back of a covered pickup truck? Yeah right! In Thailand though this is simply how you get around. There really isn’t another choice. There are of course people that take this idea to the extreme and ride around on scooters without a helmet while passing the taxi on blind corners. While I firmly believe that if you didn’t take any risks you’d never get out of bed in the morning, that’s a level of crazy that just seems suicidal.

One of the challenges of this trip thus far has been trying to negotiate the best trip for everyone. I for example didn’t mind sleeping on the saw dust mattress sans sheet in Ko Tao: the other boy’s objective with varying degrees of dislike. The debate of trains, planes, or automobiles also continues to come up, and I’m sure will continue to for the rest of the trip. It naturally leads to some tension but also has the advantage of forcing each of us to have a slightly different trip than we’d expected at the onset and I think that will make it better in the end. That doesn’t mean however that we aren’t going to split up for a while along the way.

Adding more to the story as I am now in Kanchanaburi I stayed at a different guest house last night. I’ve got no problem sleeping with just a fan (most of the time I find the air conditioning to cold actually) and 70 baht a night seemed like a way better deal than 300. We’ll see how far this goes but I’ve never been one who is afraid to go off on my own. Along the same lines, when we are traveling together on say a bus or ferry boat I like to sit with people I don’t know. My take on the situation is the people you meet along the way become the scope through which your trip is shaped so why not make it as broad as possible.

I’m going to finish off my pre-written section with what I had originally written on the train and then continue with where we are now so don’t mind the discontinuity of the next little bit. “I am actually starting to get sleepy now so I’ll finish. My final though will simple be to call attention to the fact that the boys are actually also reading the blogs as I write them. So, just for a fun little meta-mindfuck, ‘Hey guys, how’s the trip?”

For those of you wondering we opted to go up to Kanchanaburi before we head on to Angkor Wat. It just seemed like a place we would kick ourselves for not going to if we skipped it. It also allowed for us to hang out with Cory for a couple of more days.

After arriving in Bangkok we jumped in a taxi and took off to a different train station to catch another train up to Kanchanaburi. This time around we were on a 3rd class train which was, well quite 3rd class. They somewhat reminded me of cattle cars except with hard wooden seats. Oddly enough we all probably managed an hour nap on the train which is about what we had on the sleeper car so the trip wasn’t that bad. It was actually also really nice to see the country side.

Once we arrived in Kanchanaburi we decided to split up. The guys went to the tiger sanctuary to pet the beats but it just didn’t seem right to me. I’ve seen tigers before so it wasn’t something I had to do, and getting to pet a doped up tiger just so I can take a picture just seems wrong. I mean it’s cool, but I just couldn’t do it. Instead I checked out a couple of the museums in town. For those of you that don’t know Kanchanaburi is the home of the Bridge over the River Kawi. This is a famous train line that was made during the Second World War by Allied POWs to connect Burma to Thailand. If I remember correctly something like 100 000 POWs died during its construction. The museum about the bridge construction was quite well done and the actual war museum is skipable but it was still good to see. I of course also had to walk over the bridge but it was nothing special other than to say I’ve done it and seen the bridge. It’s more of the same today I think.