The Buck starts here…

So I was on another night train. Coming back up from Surat Thani to Bangkok after a week or so on the island of Ko Phangan. I was with two friends – John & Shirley, & a dude called Ken who’d we’d met at the bus station a few hours previously. We’d been smart this time. We’d booked far enough in advance to actually get seats together. Result. Once again it was not my intention to go to the disco/bar carriage. But once again fate intervened. And that’s saying something since I dont even believe in fate. This time fate sent along the nice man whose job it is to transform the seats into bunks. He’s very good at his job. I didn’t have a stopwatch handy but he can turn a seat into a bunk (pillowcase, curtains & all) faster than I can fart. Trouble is, he’d decided to do the whole seat-into-bunk manouevere at 7.45. Which is kinda early for bed. So off we trooped to the disco/bar so that we could carry on talking without having to swing upside down from our bunks like monkeys in order to do so.

We were greeted to the bar carriage by a waitress who wouldn’t have looked out of place on the field at Twickenham. And what a friendly lass she turned out to be. She leant over us & pointed aggressively at the menu. Once we had ordered she brought Ken the wrong meal & then insisted that he should eat it anyway. She kept trying to fill John’s glass with beer even though he doesn’t drink & didn’t want any & had told her this. She tried to stop Shirley from drinking the whiskey which she had purchased from the vendor in our carriage before circumstances had forced us to move. She threatened to tell the police on the next table that we were breaking some unkown rule. And throughout it all she kept reminding us that we should be happy (i.e. buy more booze).

Some people might have got pissed off with this. They may have even walked out of the carriage in disgust. Not us. We had a better plan. It’s silly & juvenile but its a hell of a lot of fun. Here’s how it goes:

Whenever this utter bitch of a waitress would come over to hassle us, we’d tell her just what we thought of her. Some choice comments included:

“You do shag horses don’t you?”
“You are such a nasty cow”
“Why dont you bugger off swiftly you damnable piece of crap”

And we’d say it with a smile. As long as you dont use well-known words such as fuck, shit or bitch there’s no problem.

Now behind this rather pathetic game there is a somewhat serious issue. It’s a sad fact of life that some people are twats. Obviously we all have the propensity to be twats from time to time, but some people are twats 24/7. Another fact of life is that some people work on trains. I have noticed that some people who work on trains are twats. Not all by any means, but some. Let me give you an example. A few years ago I was on a train in Belgium with some friends. It must have rush hour or something coz this train was packed. So packed that we were stuck in the bicycle/luggage compartment – standing, without a whole shedoodle of wiggle room. After getting smacked in the head by some dudes bag for the 43rd time, I decided to maybe have a little peek in the next carriage. the 1st class carriage. It was empty. So two of my friends & I sat down in it. We’d been there oooh about 30 seconds when up pop two guards.

“You cannot sit here, this is for 1st class passengers only.”
“There are no 1st class passengers!”
“You cannot sit here”
“The other carriage is full. There’s no where else to go.”
“You cannot sit here.”

And on it went. Eventually of course we had to move. So back to my point. People who work on trains can be twats. It’s a small pond & they’re a big fish in it, & crucially – there’s no where else you can go.. Now in England, or even in Belgium where they speak pretty good english, if some power-hungry bureaucratic fuck is gonna start being a twat then you can bet I’m going to argue the toss with them. No question. People like that prosper because not enough people stand up & say “Hang on. Why are you treating me like a number when I’m actually a human being?” Unfortunately though, this waitress was being a bitch in Thailand. and my Thai isn’t up to much. So we had to settle to being juvenile & calling her an “elliebird smelling hippo” and other such pleasantries. It’s not big & it’s not clever but it sure did make me feel better.

Yesterday evening I left Bangkok with four friends to travel by train down the peninsula that hangs off the bottom of Thailand. We arrived at Surat Thani, a port city, this morning just after dawn, & got a boat from there to the island of Ko Phangan from where I write this entry.

Because we had booked the tickets rather late our seats/bunks on the train were not together, and so we decided after an hour or so to go & sit in the restaurant/bar/disco carriage. We had a few buckets (literally small buckets of the type a kid might make sandcastles with, filled with rum, coke, soda & ice with straws sticking out of it) and ordered a bit of food. This being a “disco” carriage, there was loud music blaring from a ghetto blaster on the bar, & from time to time we would stick one of our own CD’s on. As the evening wore on, a large group of western travellers joined us in the carriage, and before long the party was in full swing, with much joy, merriment & dancing in the aisles. At 11ish we all left the carriage went back to our respective bunks & tried to get some sleep.

What’s wrong with that story? Sounds like a pretty nice evening hey? Well. Firstly it’s all true. So there’s nothing wrong with it in that respect. But’s its not the whole story. While we were happily enjoying ourselves spending what may have seemed to us like relatively small amounts of cash and dancing about having our fun, in the next carriage along row after row of Thai people were watching us. They were sitting in 3rd class seats. 3rd class doesn’t have fans. The seats are smaller and less comfortable. As our party progressed the doors between the carriages were closed. Every so often one of the partygoers would leave the carriage & forget to close the door. A Thai from the 3rd class carriage would dutifully get up & close it for us.

I’m not sure why this whole thing got to me so much. I’ve been in the developing world before. I’ve seen some of the poverty that exists here. It’s not like I’ve never heard of the fact that trains are split into classes. It’s not even as if I haven’t been on these trains myself in the past. But the division on the train last night really did upset me. Every time that door was left open I felt guilty. And the paradox in that is that in an ideal world I’d want that door to be left open.

Last night I felt like I was a member of a species of people I’ve seen all over Thailand: The arrogant westerner. I felt like my money was buying me into some kind of exclusive club. I felt like an accident of birth had given me the opportunity to travel & see the world, while the furthest one poor Thai guy will get is to Surat Thani to work his ass off for peanuts.

I couldn’t sleep for several hours after I left the disco carriage. I needed to somehow address the negativity. In a way I needed to convince myself that I’m not some arrogant, rich western shmuck just out in Southeast Asia to have a good time. And then I began to think about why I am here. To travel, and meet new people & experience new places & cultures & all that, sure. But also to be a teacher. To someow try & make a small contrbution towards making the world less of a place that has a carriage full of westerners dancing, whilst people who would live for a week on what we carelessly spend on another bucket look on. To make it less of a place where the train authorities decide that one way to differentiate between 2nd & 3rd class is to give one lot soap by the sinks, and the others not. How much does a bit of soap cost for crying out loud???

I know that what I’ve just written probably looks naive, idealistic, foolish even. But I truly believe that education is the answer to many of the worlds problems. My fellow teaching trainees are now fully qualified TEFL teachers. (TEFL = Teaching English as as Foreign Language). They have already spead across Asia and the world. One in Laos, one in Taiwan, one in Indonesia, one in Thailand and so on. It is people like them who will unite the train. Or if that is too lofty an ambition, they will at least get the people in 3rd class some soap. It’s really not too much to ask.