Bangkok, Thailand Part Deux

Bangkok Part Deux
February 26th – 28th 2010

From Vientiane, I took a bus to the Laos/Thailand border and crossed into NongKhai. There were no more overnight sleeper bunks left so I had no choice but to take a 3rd-class seat on a 13-hour train ride. It was going to be a long, long night ahead of me. I got to NongKhai around 3 pm. It was around 5 pm when I bought my ticket, the train was supposed to leave at 7:15 pm but it got delayed until 12:15 am. All that time waiting, only to suffer more torture once on the train. The 3rd class section reminded me of Indian trains compared to that Bangkok-Chiang Mai one. The seats were hard, the car crowded, and there was a lack of leg space. Sleep would be sparse.

I thought about quitting the journey around the 7-hour mark when the train arrived in NakhonRatchasima but decided to just ride it out. Some Asian guy sat beside me and we started chatting and turns out he’s from New York and been studying abroad in China. He was in Ayuthaya (about 1.5 hours from Bangkok) and was trying to get back to Bangkok but took the wrong train and fell asleep and found himself about 6 hours outside of Bangkok instead.

Not much in Bangkok, just passed time doing things like buying some new books and watching “Black Swan” until I decided to leave for Cambodia. I also got a traditional Thai massage, foot massage, and went to one of those fish spa places, where you soak your feet in a tank full of little fish and they come and nibble off the dead skin. It was very ticklish.