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Phetchaburi is an old Mon royal city dating back to the 8th Century, making it one of the oldest settlements in Thailand. The Mon are believed to be among the earliest civilised peoples of Indochina. They were the first receivers of Theravada missionaries from Sri Lanka, in contrast to their Khmer contemporaries who were generally hindu.

There are numerous temples in and around the city centre – some date back to the 12th Century. Amidst them you can also find a thriving traditional market that is buzzing with activity from pre-dawn to midday.

You should at some point be able to see a hill to the west – the Phra Nakhon Kiri park. It has three groups of buildings: One is a Royal Palace (the Khao Wang), another is a large white temple or Chedi, and the third is a temple complex reserved for the royal visitors.

King Chulalongkorn decided that the hiltop location of this palace built by his father was inconvenient, so he built another palace – the Ban Puen Palace. This one was built down by the river by German architect Karl Siegfried Dohring in Art Nouveau style. This palace now serves as a museum run by the Royal Thai Army.

Yet, its very much a working city of an agricultural province. Not many tourists stop – there isn’t much by way of infrastructure to support them anyhow.

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You’ll be passing hundreds of caves hidden along your journey on the Southern Line, and they’re pretty incredible places.

Most caves in Thailand are solutional caves, or karst caves, formed out of the limestone this country is so rich in. Limestone is dissolved by rainwater due to its presence of carbonic acid. As it seeps through the soil, reacts with and erodes the limestone to create cracks, holes, and sometimes even huge sinkholes. As water trickles through the cracks and collects to create underground caverns with the familiar surreal landscape, with stalactites, stalagmites, columns, and a menagerie of other oddities that produced over millions of years.

Thailand has some real doozies, but they’re different in this part of the world largely because of the way humans interact with them. Caves have been considered sanctuaries and mythical or holy places in many cultures, and explorers have found and documented prehistoric cave art and ancient burial grounds in Thailand. But most commonly, you will find Buddhist alters and temples, which is what you will find in the Khao Luang Cave.

The practice of creating cave temples originated in India and spread with Buddhism. Sites were often chosen for their scenic beauty, and suitability as a quiet focus of worship and meditation for monks and visiting pilgrims and traders. Often cave temples were located along the trade routes and used by merchants as banks or warehouses.

Colourfully painted Buddhist images and statues are usually arranged in the caves according to a strict iconographic program, and are either carved directly from the rock or crafted from mixture of clay and straw built up around lattices of wood or metal.

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You’re likely to see a lot of rice paddy on the Southern Line, particularly in its northern reaches, so we best explain what you’re seeing.

There are generally three rice harvests per year in Thailand. So depending on when you’re travelling today, you should be able to see rice production at one of a few stages:

First, the muddy field is churned with a plough – usually with a hand-held tractor device but sometimes a buffalo drawn plough – to prepare for the ground for seeding.

Secondly, whole rice seeds, basically rice but with the outer husks still in place, is soaked for a couple of days before being spread over the ground, and the field is flooded with water from irrigation.

With a bit of time, this grows green seedlings, which are then bundled and ready to transplant – roots and all – across the field in bunches of three about a foot apart in a grid.

With a bit more time, the seedlings grow and the rice stalks emerge. By the time the paddy begins to turn brown, the rice is harvested by cutting mid-way up the stem.

The cut stalks are beaten against a hard surface to release the rice, which is then dried in the sun. The rice you eat is the endosperm of the seed that has been separated from the husk.

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The Thai Southern Line can take you all the way down the Malay Peninsular, even to Singapore if you change trains at Pedang Besar.

The Malay Peninsular is formed by the Tennaserim Hill system rising from the Indian and Pacific Oceans due to the seam in the earth’s techtonic plates – particularly the Indian plate running into the massive Eurasian plate. This collision also gives rise to the Himalayas, of which the Tennaserim range is the most southerly tendril.

Over the years, this northern part of the Pensisular and its isthmus has been a shifting front between the predominantly Buddhist kindgoms of the floodplains to the north and the predominantly Muslim trading sultanates to the south, with pockets of different peoples in the hills, such as the Mon and Karen. And it is still the case today.

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It won’t look like it, but the Southern Line train actually passes THROUGH an ancient city.

Khu Bua is a ruin that dates to the 6th century Dvaravati culture when it was one the major trading ports and city states that served that kingdom. But the city is thought by some in Thailand to have been established during the Suvarnabhumi Kingdom – a kingdom so old that it is known about only through myths and legends in ancient buddhist and Greek texts – particularly in the maps of Ptolemy. Suvarnabhumi – a name you might have noticed if you came to Thailand via Bangkok’s main airport – means “Land of Gold”, and it is thought that gold was brought back from here to the Temple of Jerusalem by traders from the Levant.

Khu Bua is a rectangular site of around 800 by 2000 metres surrounded by the remains of an earthen wall and a moat. The foundations of early temples and buildings still lay scattered within the site.

The architectural and artistic features are those of the Indian Gupta Dynasty, which promoted buddhism in the region after it was first introduced during the reign of Ashoka.

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Welcome to Rachaburi! It means City of the King, so named because it was the birthplace of King Rama the 1st: the founder of the Chakri Dynasty that still rules to this day.

The town itself is unremarkable, but there are a couple of interesting sites surrounding it. The first is the ruins of Khu Bua, talked about in a separate blip to the south. You’ll be crossing the Mae Klong river runs through Ratchaburi town, and a little downstream is the Damnoen Saduak floating markets – one of the more authentic and enjoyable floating markets in Thailand. You can also visit the Damnoen Saduak Tiger Zoo, where you can pat adult tigers and feed baby ones for the small price of their freedom and my respect for you.

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Rice agriculture uses over half the arable land and more than half of all its workers – around 16 million people. Thats more people than who live in Bangkok. And these rice farmers make a formidable voting block.

But the onset of modern agribusiness practices had left many of Thailand’s smallest rice producers on the economic fringes of this booming industry. The government of Thailand’s efforts to rectify this has redefined Thai politics.

In 2011, Thailand was the biggest rice exporter in the world, and Yingluck Sinawatra was campaigning to become Prime Minister of Thailand. Whether driven by the alleviation of rural poverty, or something more nefarious, she promised Thai farmers to buy their rice at prices about 50% above global market rates. The rice farmers voted her into power.

Her scheme was to buy the unprocessed grains, store them in vast quantities and prevent them from reaching the international market, and thereby push up international rice prices to beyond even the 50% markup before selling it all off with a healthy profit. Genius, right!

Well, she was counting on India – the world’s biggest producer of rice – maintaining its ban on rice exports.

But of course, one week after she won the election and plundered the national accounts to buy oodles of Thai rice, India lifted its ban, sending rice prices for a monumental dive. Ouch! Worst of all, the 18 million tons of Thai rice that had been stockpiled began to deteriorate! And then criminal gangs reportedly colluded with corrupt officials to steal it.

Altogether, the failed scheme cost Thailand 19 billion USD, money that could have gone towards – for example – providing basic services to the rural poor. But instead, the government’s funds dried up, leaving farmers unpaid, and protests agains the new government got so bad that the Thai military kicked Yingluck out of government and fined her over 1 billion USD for her role in the scheme. The Thai people were fed-up. They endorsed the military’s move, leaving the new junta no rush to return the country to a state of democracy. So thats where we stand today.

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The town of Photharam has a few sites of note:

The first is Wat Khao Chong Pran, otherwise known as the Bat Temple. Every evening as the sun goes down, millions of bats pour out of a cave in a giant stream of screeches running a gauntlet of predatory birds. The cave itself now contains a shrine, but is hard to get to due to the overwhealming smell of ammonia. You can also climb the hill to get a great view of the whole spectacle, and that of the sunset too. If you’re passing it at the right time, look out to the west for it.

The only other interesting place in Photharam would be the Suntree Land of Dolls. Its kind of a museum of dolls, but without so much of a historic or cultural point. If you’re a lover of dolls and stuffed toys, you’d be in luck. For everyone else, its just creepy as heck.

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You’re now in the floodplain of the Mae Klong, in the greater Chao Phraya floodplain, which is where most of Thailand lives.

Once every 2 or 3 years when the river floods over onto the floodplain, a large amount of fine sediment called alluvium is deposited onto the floodplain. The finer and lighter alluvium such as clay and silt drifts further away from the river out into the plains during a flood, and this regular deposit of alluvium is what makes these areas so fertile and suitable for rice cropping.

The larger, heavier, and coarser alluvium such as gravel and sand is deposited closer to the river. This means that After many flood events, raised areas of land, called levees, build up on the river banks. This is what is often preventing you from seeing the Chao Phraya itself, or its tributaries, from the train.

To a large extent, you could consider Thailand a Kingdom defined by the Chao Phraya river system. Its agricultural richness is due to this flooding cycle. Thailand’s borders are in the mountains that skirt its basin. The early trade that made the Ayutthaya kingdom powerful was built on the river’s navigability, and the canals that spread from it helped to transport its levers of power to the neighbouring chiefdoms and kingdoms.

Flooding is a normal and necessary part of life in a floodplains. Yet severe flooding of this floodplain has also been the scourge of modern and developed Thailand. For example, the 2011 monsoon season innundated over 20,000 square kilometers, left Bangkok flooded for around 6 months – killing 815 people and further affecting 13.6 million with almost 50 billion dollars of damage, particularly in the industrial estates on the outskirts of Bangkok. Disrupted supply chains led to a global shortage of hard disk drives, and automobile parts.

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As the Southern Line bends to the South (if you’re coming from Bangkok), you start following the Mae Klong.

You’ve likely never heard of that river, but its name a bit upstream from here is the River Kwai.

“The Bridge on the River Kwai” is a wonderful Academy Award winning film released in 1957 starring Sir Alec Guiness. It is based on a book by a Frenchman named Pierre Boulle. Boulle was trained in Avignon as an enginneer, which taught him a lot about how to construct bridges. In 1935 he travelled to Malaya to be a rubber planter and when the Japanese came, he was trained as a sabateur, which taught him how to blow up bridges. He was also imprisoned, not by the Japanese, but by the Vichy French in Hanoi, which taught him a lot about being a prisoner of war. So Boulle had a lot of first hand experience which led to him writing such a compelling story. However, he had never been on the Thailand-Burma railway. The novel, and especially the later screenplay, was an amalgamation of his experiences, and the stories he and others heard from Malayan rubber plantation workers that did experience the ordeal first hand.

So we can forgive Boulle for making the slight blunder of geography in the naming of the film. The bridge that the movie is about was actually built on the Mae Klong. The Kwai Noi – meaning Little Tributary in Thai – spills into the Mae Klong about 4km downstream from the Bridge. However, in the 1960s, due no doubt in small part to the success of the film, the upper part of the Mae Klong – above where the Kwai Noi joins – was renamed the River Kwai Yai or “Big Tributary”.

The River Kwai, or the Mae Klong, is also in a famous scene from another Academy Award winning film – the Deer Hunter. The bank of the River Kwai Yai that the first Russian Roulette scene was filmed with Robert Deniero and Christopher Walken. The Thai actor who played the vicious Viet Cong gamemaster was actually recruited from the local Thai village, and was the second choice. The brutal slaps the two hollywood stars endured from the Gamemaster in the scene had to be real, but the first actor couldn’t bring himself to do it. Luckily, they found a man who thought he would enjoy it, and the brutal scene still gives me goosebumps.

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