Happy Vernal Equinox. This morning we took an organized tour to the floating market which was an enormous traffic jam of tourist boats. We didn’t get out on the river until late and by then the market ladies in their straw hats and narrow boats loaded with produce were back home again, except for a few enterprising women who stayed to sell bananas to the tour guide to distribute to the tourists.
We got to our train heading south from Bangkok at 4:00 with 10 minutes to spare and found our private compartment. It had elegant wood paneling and louvered doors. We had a coke in the dining car with fresh flowers on the table and watched one of the prettiest sunsets I’ve ever seen as we rolled through the countryside south of Bangkok. The only mistake we made was not to ask the ticket seller what time the train got into Hadyai because he spoke English. We asked the ticket puncher conductor and understood him to say between 4 and 5am. Whoops. So we slept fitfully, afraid we would miss our stop and finally at 3am got dressed and opened the door and window and dozed, looking out every time we slowed down. We had lost our Thailand map so didn’t know exactly where we were. Well, the next morning we found out arrival would be about 10 or 11am. Boy were we dumb. We finally arrived at 2pm
After a wash-up at our hotel – the Orient – we took a bus to Songkla and had a great crab fried rice dinner on the sand and Bryan swam in the Gulf of Siam.
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