Category:

Nong Pladuck Junction is the crossroads where the Japanese began to lay tracks West. One line veers north and run 142km into the rice country around Suphanburi. Then a couple of kilometres further West, the Southern Line splits south down the Isthmus of Kra, running all the way down to Singapore. This is the track of the famed Eastern Orient Express.

There is a 3rd option – the Death Railway. Shortly after Pearl Harbour the Japanese forces found that British Burma was becoming a liability to its conquest of the Eastern Hemisphere. Burma was one of the Allies’ last sources of rubber, an increasingly important wartime commodity, and it was also a back-door to supply the anti-Japanese resistance in China. So, in early 1942, Imperial Japan invaded Burma from the sea and by land over the Tenasserim Range that we’re now heading towards. They installed a puppet regime, and continued North-West to dig into British India.

If it was only that simple. At its peak, the Allied Forces’ Burma Campaign saw around 1 million troops come from aross the British Empire to head off the Armies of Imperial Japan and its puppet regimes. For Imperial Japan, fighting on this front, and keeping control of Burma meant supplying an equally formidable war effort from the East. However, the Tenasserim Range that divides Thailand from Burma, with its hilly topography, rivers, dense jungles and monsoonal climate, made for a terrible supply route. The alternative sea-route via Singapore and the Malacca Strait was long, and made for easy pickings by the Allied Navy. Linking the Thai rail network to the British-built rail network in on the other side of the hills was the only solution. If successful, Japanese-held Burma would turn from a strategic over-reach into a strategic stronghold – one from which to dig further into British India.

So from this important junction, in early 1942, Japan’s Imperial Army started to lay track urgently, and disasterously. Allow me, if you will, to paint a grusome image in your minds to lend perspective to the scale of this undertaking, and the scale of its tragedy: If you laid down PEOPLE down parrallel to these tracks, lining them up head to feet, for the entire 415km of the Death Railway, thats actually about how many people worked on it, against their will. About 240,000. Every 10th person was an Allied soldier, and the other 9 were civilians from across Southeast Asia that were recruited by force to work under the same horrific conditions. Those laying beside the portion of track that still remains today – from here for about 2 hours to the end of the line at Nam Tok: They didn’t make it.

Comments closed

Nakhon Pathom is a surprise. We really recommend you explore it.

PRA PATHOMACHEDI
Phra Pathommachedi is ancient and monumental… but if you’re looking for records, its probably not QUITE there. Its name means the ‘first holy stupa’. That’s because it was, probably, the first buddhist stupa in Thailand, built somewhere in around 200 to 300 BC – we don’t know exactly. But, Shwedagon Pagoda, only about 500km to the Northeast in Myanmar, is thought to be a wee bit older, and there are many older in the Subcontinent where Buddhism comes from. But its very old indeed.
It was originally built with a more modestly sized dome aligned more with the subcontinental style at the time. It was the Emperor Ashoka that wanted it built as part of his efforts to spread the word of Buddha eastward. However, it was deserted and left to the jungle for hundreds of years before being restored under the orders of King Rama the 4th in the 19th Century. Rama the 4th made a few modifications – he saw it shaped into its pointed shape and megalithic scale, extending the height by around 40 metres, and it now CLAIMS to be the TALLEST stupa on earth… However, the way I see it, at 120.45m its a body’s length shorter than the 122m Jetavanaramaya stupa in Sri Lanka, which is also much more rotund and massive.
So… yeah. Phra Pathommachedi – no doubt ONE OF the world’s great pagodas.

NAKHON PATHOM
Nakhon Pathom is often considered to be the oldest city in Thailand, dated roughly by the original building of the Phra Pathom Chedi – claimed to be the tallest stupa in the world at 120.45m. When the Indian Emperor Ashoka wanted to spread the word of Buddha east, it is thought that the Phra Pathom Chedi was one of the first Buddhist Wats to be built in the whole of Southeast Asia around 200 to 300BC, but we don’t know exactly. To get a better idea of how ancient Nakhon Pathom is, it is worth noting that it was founded as a coastal city – at the mouth of the Tha Chin river, and a trading port between China and India. But the Tha Chin and Chao Praya rivers deposited 50km worth of sediments over the centuries and changed their courses to leave the city without water entirely. Its early population deserted it and the jungle reclaimed it. In the 19th Century, King Rama the 4th ordered the pagoda to be fully restored, a summer palace built, and the area resettled. He built the canal that you have seen alongside the railway to bring back fresh water, agriculture, and to allow his royal barge to get there. Under Rama the 4th’s patronage, Nakhon Pathom has grown into a spiritually, architecturally, and gastronomically rich and diverse city. During the years of Japanese influence, a sprawling fine arts university, Silpakorn university, was built around the King’s palace, founded by the famed Florentine sculptor, Corrado Feroci. The city is also well known for its variety and quality of fruits, and particularly its pomello. If you see someone selling some at the station, its worth the risk.

SANAM CHANDRA PALACE
You can’t quite see from the train, but the Sanam Chandra Palace lies off over yonder. It was a place for the Royal Family to stay when they came to Nakhon Pathom to pay homage to the Phra Pathom Chedi. Built in the 1st decade of the 1900s, it is a bit odd for a few reasons: Its architecture has strong European motifs. This is not uncommon in the palaces of Thai Royalty at the time – King Rama the 6th was an Anglophile and British architectural motifs from various eras can be seen in its facade. Its structure also eludes to defensive intentions. With Thailand being an Absolute Monarchy at the time when that was going out of fashion – the Qing Dynasty had just been overthrown in China, for example – Rama the 6th saw Nakhon Pathom as a strategically located city – a good retreat from Bangkok should there ever be a national crisis. So his palace is a stronghold: Built on high ground on an island surrounded by a moat of canals. In 1911, Rama the 6th also formed the Wild Tiger Corps – a 4,000 strong personal paramilitary guard, which trained on these palace grounds. The Wild Tiger Corps quickly came to rival the Regular Thai Army, and its esteem with the King caused dissent in the Thai Army’s ranks. It took a coup d’etat and an attempt on the King’s life by a small group in the Thai Army officers in 1912 to convince the King that this was all a bad idea. The Wild Tiger Corps was disbanded soon after.
Another strange sight at the Palace is the statue of a dog that sits in front of it. This is Ya-Le, Rama the 6th’s dog. He was a street dog, but a great dog by all accounts. The King found him while inspecting a prison in Nakhon Pathom. The story goes that the King was so enamoured by the pooch as to cause one person to shoot the poor dog out of sheer envy. The King placed Ya-Le’s life-size bronze likeness in its current honoured position guarding the palace, and penned a poem about him which is inscribed on the statue’s mount.

Comments closed

Thailand is a country of water, particularly in its floodplains. Canals and bridges have been a major engineering feat.

CANALS
The waterways are such an essential part of Thailand’s developmental story that I would be remiss not to discuss it. You may have seen a canal running along side the track on your right earlier – this forms one of the many links between the Tha Chin river you just crossed, and the great Chao Phraya river which runs through Bangkok. You may see another canal off to your left linking the Tha Chin to the next river, and eventually the River Kwai. There is an incredible latticework of canals criss-crossing the whole of central Thailand’s river basin. Although canals were being dug in Thailand for centuries – mainly to form defensive moats – the nation-building project commenced with the founding of the Royal Irrigation Department in 1908 by King Rama the 5th. The King appointed, as you might guess, a Dutchman – Mr. Yehoman vander Heide – as the irrigation expert to plan out the drainage of the alluvial plain we’re in. The thousands of kilometers of canals, as well as the complex system of thousands of barrages, locks, and pump-houses means, importantly, that the Thai people are better protected from flooding. Although its not fullproof as the floods of 2011 showed – that was the worst flooding in Thailand’s recorded history and profoundly impacted the Thai economy, and even the global economy. These canals can sometimes also be used for transportation, and – unfortunately – they also help dispose of rubbish and waste. Most importantly, they are the life force of Thai agriculture, which is, among many things, now a global superpower in rice. It is hard to imagine such a large and wealthy population living on such a low-lying, monsoonal, and flood-prone piece of real-estate without this impressive network of canals.

BRIDGES
A bit to the East is the Truss bridge over the Tha Chin River.
The Japanese and the quarter of a million people that worked on the Death Railway built around 600 bridges. This bridge is not one of them – its far more sturdy. The Japanese Imperial Army’s construction project began about 40km ahead under much tighter deadlines. This bridge is, however, typical of iron truss railway bridges found throughout Thailand, the vast majority of which were built after the war. Pay particular attention to the angular iron struts you should see out the window as you go past – you’ll see this later.

The river is the Tha Chin – a distributary of the great Chao Phraya river that flows through Bangkok and feeds Central Thailand’s alluvial plain. The Tha Chin splits from the Chao Phraya a couple of hundred kilometres to your right in the North, and meanders it’s own way to the Gulf of Thailand.

Comments closed

Buddhist Temples are everywhere in Thailand. There’s a lot to learn about them. And this one in particular is quite peculiar.

Buddhist Temples

As you cut through the Thai countryside, you will see many temple complexes with glimmering structures, intricate details, and immaculate spaces. Buddhist temples in Thailand are known as “wats“, meaning an enclosure, and generally contain 7 or 8 types of buildings, each of which have their own symbolic, ceremonial, or practical importance.

The largest building is usually the Ubosot, or Ordination Hall, which usually contains the main images of the Buddha and illustrations of the stories of the Buddha’s life on richly decorated walls, windows, gables, and doors. The tiered roofs to maintain a grand and elevated aesthetic over the large areas they cover, and you will see the blade-like pointed finials at the ends of the roof that take various sculpted forms of the head of the Naga – a serpentine dragon – or the Geruda – a humanoid bird. The Ubosot is usually surrounded by 8 Sema Stones – one at each corner and mid-way along the wall – to delineate the consecrated area of the Ubosot. They are often housed in small but ornate pedestals, and another Sema Stone is also buried under the Ubosot before it is built.

The most eye-catching structures are usually the large Stupa or Pagoda – usually the bell-shaped monolith, often coated or painted with gold, but which can vary markedly in style and shape. These structures enshrine important relics of the Buddha (such as bones, teeth, or hair) and sometimes of kings or other important people. It seems that the larger they are, the better, and they can get rather large indeed!

You may occasionally notice a tall chimney: these stem from a crematorium, with cremation being the preferred burial right for Thai buddhists. Other structures you may see include bell-towers used to summon monks to their devotions, libraries built in ponds or on high structures to protect scriptures from insects and fire, and the Kuti – or monk’s dwellings.

Keep an eye out for the occasional large fig-like tree amidst the buildings. This is ficus religiosa – the “Bhodi tree”. In Bodh Gaya in Northern India stands the original Bhodi tree under which the Buddha meditated for 7 days without moving and achieved illumination (or “Bhodi”), and the Bhodi trees you may see are planted with seeds descending from this original.

Wat Sistrathong

You’ll notice that we’re passing a lot of temple complexes, but Wat Sisrathong is interesting because it is dedicated to the worship of Phra Rahu, the God of Darkness. In Thai legends, Pra Rahu is an immortal giant that periodically eats his brothers – the sun and the moon. That is to say, he’s the cheeky one behind solar and lunar eclipses. Black is his shade, and he likes grapes, liquor, coffee, jelly, sticky rice, beans, cake, or preserved eggs, because they’re also all black. If you want to make an offering to him, you’ll have to place 8 items – and it has to be 8 – of one of his favourite foods upon his alter. Then your dark days will be over!

Comments closed

There’s a strange little museum tucked away out here, but I think it deserves a mention.

There are a few of these big old Royal State Railways of Siam steam engines you’ll see scattered beside the tracks on this trip, and throughout the Thai rail network. But these particular ones are actually part of a rather surprising museum a little down the road. The Jesada Technik Museum is a 500-odd strong private collection of vintage rare cars, motorbikes, boats, amphibious craft, and aeroplanes created by a transport mogul named Jesada Deshsakulrith. Most of his cars are in the category you might call “cute” – the inexpensive European bubble-car varieties (of which there are surprisingly more than I thought) – and are in immaculate condition. He also boasts a couple of London Double-decker Buses, New York taxis, and a Back-To-The-Future-esque Dolorean. Jeseda only started collecting in 1997 and it opened to the public in 2007, the same year he bought a decommissioned Soviet whiskey-class submarine, which unfortunately sunk off the Swedish coast while being towed enroute to this museum. If you’re a bit of a automobile enthusiast, perhaps go check it out on the way back. If you don’t have time, you can now walk through the sprawling collection in his hangar using Google street-view – just look up Jeseda Technik Museum on Google Maps when you get online.

Comments closed

For a small town, Salaya has plenty going on.

Salaya

The small town of Salaya is noted for three things. Foremost is the grand Phuttamonthon park hosting the world’s tallest freestanding buddha, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Second, it is a university town with a few colleges, as well as a large peri-urban campus of the renowned Mahibol University, which is an offshoot of the Siraraj Medical School located next to the Old Thonburi station which you may have visited earlier. Finally, you should see Chong Thanon Salaya Market right next to the train station. Thailand’s markets are legendary. While many of Bangkok’s markets are tourist-oriented, most mid-sized markets like this act as focal points for the Kingdom’s communities. This one in particular is said to have great samosas, and an interesting sort of steamed pancake.

The Phutthomonton Park

Through the trees and buildings, you just might be able to get a glimpse of the world’s highest freestanding statue of Buddha from the train line. The 52ft high cast of a walking Buddha casts a silhouette against the sky at day. It is attributed to the Corrado Feroci – an Italian born sculptor of many of Bangkok’s most famous monuments, and founder of Silpakorn University of Fine Arts – but it was cast in 1981, almost 20 years after his death. The statue sits bang in the middle of a 400 hectare park that is popular both for worshipers as well as runners and cyclists. If you need to stretch your legs and are happy to take the next train, the park sits adjascent to a modest botanical gardens and the campus of Mahidol University – one of Thailand’s most reputed.

Comments closed

One night in Bangkok and the world’s… your… oyster…

Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit is the longest city name in the world. It translates to “City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of royal palaces, home of gods incarnate, erected by Visvakarman at Indra’s behest.”

That pretty much describes Bangkok: Big, messy, complicated, and lots going on. Incidentally, Visvakarman and Indra are principle deities in Hinduism and Buddhism respectively. The 9 gems refers to the auspicious combination of diamond, ruby, emerald, yellow sapphire, garnet, blue sapphire, pearl, topaz and cat’s eye - essentially Thailand’s crown jewels.

Bangkok is like Thailand’s beating heart.

It is the central node around and through which the economy, politics, and society ebbs and flows. And its Thailand’s portal to the rest of the world, which is why the Kings that held the mouth of the Chao Phraya became the Kings of Siam.

Bangkok is kind of a big deal even by international standards. It regularly exceeds even Paris and New York for the number of international visitors. There are more high-rises in Bangkok than any US city except New York. Were Thailand a wealthier country, Bangkok would be listed amongst the world’s most powerful and influential cities.
Bangkok is truly one of those cities - like Paris, New York, or Tokyo - that can take a weekend to see, but needs a lifetime to truly know and fully appreciate.

Bangkok is also Thailand’s black hole.

22% of Thais live here - over 14 million people - which, for an agrarian country, is kinda insane. Its a classic example of a “primate city” - a city that is disproportionately larger and more important than any other in its country. And as Thailand continues to grow - at around 4 to 5% per year on average - so does Bangkok grow even more disproportionately. It engulfs the surrounding countryside slowly, but is sucking in the whole country’s energy, including Thailand’s young people. There’s now just so much “stuff” in Bangkok that the city is sinking into its floodplain - around and inch every year on average. A tropical floodplain is a terrible place to put a Bangkok.

Bangkok is truly one of those cities like Paris, New York, or Tokyo, that it can take a weekend to see, but would take a lifetime to truly know and appreciate. I can’t really do it justice in this humble format, but I’ll leave it at this: If you’re leaving Bangkok and are happy about it, you probably didn’t do it right. If you’re arriving into Bangkok, my advice is to scrutinise where you’re getting your information about where to go and what to see – following the tourist crowd will probably lead to disappointment. There are so many authentic, fascinating, and energetic parts of the city to explore if you go against the flow.

Comments closed

Tailing Chan is where the Thonburi branch merges, is a new BTS hub, and a sight of a nasty train crash!

THONBURI BRANCH:
It is here that there is a little fork in the road. One track to Thonburi Station – or Bangkok Noi – and the other loops around Bangkok and down to Hua Lumphong Station from the North.

TAILING CHAN CRASH
At dawn on 21 August 1979, a train very similar to yours approached this rail junction. A freight train was coming from the North from Bang Sue Junction and either did not receive or did not notice the red light. The junction manager said he saw the driver of the freight train ‘frantically waving from the engine’s window’. It was too late. The freight train collided into the rear end of the passenger train in the middle of the intersection. Both trains derailed. There were 51 deaths and 138 injured. Many of the passengers were students heading to school from Thonburi Station. The accident was one of the most horrific rail disasters in Thailand, and was the second major incident in Thailand that year after a fuel-laden tanker train also ran into a passenger train, sparking an inferno in an adjacent market… So uh, yeah. Have a nice trip!

THE MIGHTY BTS
You should be able to see the very latest extensions to Bangkok’s elevated train system. From the mid-80s, the numbers of cars in Bangkok was rising by around one-third every year, leaving the city with a catatonically slow average traffic speed of 10km per hour by the beginning of the 90s. So an ambitious plan was developed in 1991 to build up! … The plan was then axed when the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis sapped the Thai economy funds and too little progress was being made. But the experiment with the megolithic use of concrete seemed to be a hit, and was a central theme of the next plan and its modern iterations. This is no doubt to the delight of Thailand’s cement and construction companies, as well as landholders near the BTS lines who invariably see leaps in prices as the Thai middle class lap up adjacent condominiums … The BTS has certainly changed the character of Bangkok – sometimes negatively… but each new line can move 25,000 people per hour in each direction, and this has probably saved Bangkok (from itself).

Comments closed

Chao Phraya translates to “the Chief”, such is the importance of this River to the Thai Nation.

It is along this river that international trade emerged between the river capital of Ayutthaya (and later Bangkok) and the great civilisations of Asia. From this maritime trade, the Kingdom on the Chief River became the most wealthy in the River basin. With his wealth, the Ayutthaya Kingdom was able to build canals to the neighbouring rivers, allowing to extend their irrigation systems, and also transport their influence to dominate other Kingdoms and Chiefdoms, eventually forming the great Kingdom that continues to thrive today.

You aren’t likely to see the Chao Phraya much, as when the train gets close enough, your views may be blocked by its natural levies or human development on its shoreline. But the Chao Phraya and the rivers that feed it will never be far on the Northern Line.

Comments closed

Where the train lines diverge between North and South is as good a place as any to tell you a bit about both.

THE NORTHERN LINE:
The Northern Line was the first line that King Chulalongkorn built when he founded Thailand’s rail system in the early 1900s. It took 16 years to build to its current extent, and totally changed Thailand. Before this train, getting from here to Chiang Mai woudl mean weeks of travel – by riverboat or muddy bullock cart up through the floodplains, and then over mountainous roads into the Northern highlands. The Northern Line reduced that trip down to a couple of days, and now takes about 12 hours. The reduction in the time and cost of transport meant that, economically, large new tracts of Thailand’s hinterlands – and particularly the agricultural heartland of the Chaophraya River basin – was brought into the global economic trading network that Thailand had established over the centuries. Politically, it meant that the Siamese capital could better communicate with, and project its central power into, the restive northern areas, and demonstrate to its expansionist colonial neighbours that its borders could be enforced and Thailand was not to be trifled with.

THE SOUTHERN LINE:
The turnoff towards the West loops us, eventually, towards the South. It too has helped bring new economic connectivity, central political legitimacy, and security to the southern reaches of Thailand, but to a lesser extent as it follows the ancient maritime trading routes along the coast of Thailand down to its southern neighbours in the Malay Peninsular.

The line connects all the way down to Singapore (previously it took you all the way into central Singapore, but they’ve moved the railhead to the North of Singapore Island, just across the causeway). It would take an uncomfortable day and a half by regular Thai and Malay services to get there, and you could do it for about $50.

The luxury option is the Eastern & Oriental Express. They have trains departing once or twice a month heading from Singapore to Bangkok and back, taking either three or 4 days, depending on the direction you go. The service commenced in 1992 by the same people who operate the Venice-Simplon Orient Express in Europe. Generously refurbished Japanese coaches feature two dining cars, a lounge car, a piano bar car, a saloon car with a reading room and a small boutique, and an open-air observation deck at the rear of the train, which is perfect for us window seaters. Tickets start at a couple of US dollars each way, depending on the time of year and your birthing.

OTHER LINES:
The infamous “Death Railway”, originally built in WWII by the Japanese, and which sets the scene for the famous book and movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, splits off the Southern Line after Nakhon Pathom. The Eastern lines, which head to Nong Khai (connecting to Vientiane, Laos), and Ubon Ratchathani, split off later, a bit north of Ayutthaya. The lines to Aranyaprathet (near the Cambodian border) and Pattaya split off further south.

Comments closed