Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

SOLVING THE PROBLEM of how to leave the enormous city, one night I took a taxi to the railway station at the center of Bangkok. I had a ticket on the 2045, the night train to the Laotian border at Nong Khai. At the station there were no formalities, no security, no ticket check, no warnings, no friskings. I bought a big bottle of water and some beer, saw from the departure board that my train would be leaving from platform 3, found my sleeper, and climbed aboard. This was about thirty minutes before we left. I was seated, drinking a beer, when the conductor knocked on my door, said hello, and punched my ticket. Then he made my bed. And soon after, we slid away from the station, headed north.

I had found a Simenon paperback in one of the big Bangkok book stores, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. I got into bed and enjoyed one of the most pleasant experiences I know in travel, tucked into a wide berth on an Asiatic train, in a private compartment, reading as the coach gently rocks, and knowing that I won't have to stir for twelve hours, when I will be at the edge of another country, a new frontier.

At dawn, I kicked the shade up and saw flooded paddy fields and the great flat landscape of northern Thailand. I opened the window and the train stopped at a small station where there were handsome families, a smiling monk wrapped in his ocher robe, and pretty girls in T-shirts and white shorts—on this entire trip, Thailand offered me my first glimpse of women's bare legs. The stations were swept and tidy, no litter, everyone in clean clothes, children playing, and adding to the calmness and serenity there were plenty of benches and chairs where people waited for the next train. The cleanliness seemed to represent a kind of optimism and self-esteem, and all this order was framed by green fields and polyphonic birdsong.

I tend to evaluate places according to habitability—whether I can live in them. Passing an idyllic glade, I saw a hammock strung between two palm trees and myself swinging in it. This self-centered impulse I put down to my escapist fantasies inspired by distant places, but it's only human to look for an ideal location to live in, the great good place we all seek. A lovely landscape, I think, but if I am able to put myself into it, surely it is lovelier.

On the way to Nong Khai on this train I saw a sunlit bungalow on stilts on a side road, a hammock underneath it, some banana trees and chickens near it, a vegetable garden behind it, rice paddies beyond it, an ox in a meadow and low jungle all around, and I thought: Yes, it would be nice to live there. Except for a flicker of temptation in Sri Lanka, I had never had a serious thought of this anywhere else so far. But in the north of Thailand, I entertained the notion of simply dropping out of the world and fitting myself into this version of pastoral, walking up and down in my pajama bottoms.

When I arrived in Nong Khai, on the Mekong River, as though to prove the validity of this impression, who should get out of the train but two big wheezy farangs, red-faced and chain-smoking, with their Thai wives and a sister-in-law. They had boarded the train some way down the line, perhaps at the very place I was having escape fantasies.

Miles was from England. He wore a heavy suit and tie in spite of the heat. Rudi—tattooed, quite fat, in a black T-shirt and boots—was from Rotterdam.

"We got on the train at Khon Kaen."

"Visiting there?" I asked.

"We live there," Rudi said.

"It's heaven," Miles said. "About a hundred expats—all good chaps. We look after each other. We're all brothers in Khon Kaen."

Rudi said, "But I go back to Holland."

Miles was only half listening. He was speaking to the three Thai women, seeming to berate them, going, "Bumpity-bump, bop-bop."

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"You really should learn the language, old chap. Makes life so much easier. Kon-kap. Bop-bop. Bumpity-bip."

Miles made it sound like Martian, pursing his lips, nodding, widening his eyes. His face was slick with perspiration.

The women smiled patiently and murmured among themselves.

I met the farangs again later on in the morning, nearer the river, in an open-fronted shed called Alex's Travel Service, where Laotian visas were being processed and sold. This was efficiently done—you could have your photo taken, or send a fax, or have a meal, for it was also a noodle stall. I had my breakfast noodles while my visa application was being initialed and stamped. Then I wandered outside.

"Is that your wife?" I asked Rudi.

"Yes," he said. "Well, not my wife but the woman I liff wiz."

The three women were middle-aged, beginning to thicken, but with the warm Thai smile and the placid, self-contained serenity, talking among themselves, without complaint, and now and then acknowledging Miles's approximation of Thai.

"We have everything in Khon Kaen," Miles said to me. "Even a hospital."