30.01 Day 15 Bangkok & Train
Day 15 - Tue 30th Jan - Bangkok to start of overnight train
With a rough plan to head out this morning, leaving our bags to collect later for the train, we check out around 9am and walk to the airport, which is effectively attached to our train station, to pick up a bus.
As sometimes happens on these walks, Seb overheats and needs constant encouragement to put one foot in front of the other. At the airport he cools down inside the Arrivals hall with Kate and Sienna while I stand guard for the bus. Once on, our bus driver is casually flying down the toll road and 20 minutes later Kate and Sienna hop off at the second stop to revisit the Butterfly Garden.
Seb and I stay onboard 2 more stops to go direct to the Children's Discovery Museum again. Except we don’t stop where I expect and when we are able to get off we are faced with a healthy walk back on ourselves to the museum. Thankfully Seb’s mood is back to full brightness, supported by classic walking distraction games of avoid-the-cracks, followed by its sister game only-walk-on-the-cracks which brings us to step-on-every-paving-slab, morphing in to step-on-every-second-slab, leading in to how-many-stairs-up-this-bridge and, for good measure, how-many-stairs-is-it-down-the-other-side? By the time Seb actually looks up, we’ve arrived at the museum.
After playing with Duplo, surrounded by bus loads of school children, Kate and Sienna arrive after walking from the Butterfly Garden and we watch the 4D movie on Dream City. Which is very much the dream city of someone who has only ever lived in a city - they can dream of cars without exhaust fumes, but they can’t dream of less cars on the road. More is better, more is prosperity.
Sienna gets her wish to build a dream city of her own out of wooden blocks - the temples of Ayutthaya and Bangkok have had some cut through as they are now a must have, along with multiple libraries obviously, because that’s Sienna’s Dream City.
As per our last visit, lunch is taken across the road at a food court followed by a rewarding ice-cream from Mixue. Back in the museum and we stumble upon a hitherto undiscovered arts and crafts centre where the kids patiently make two elegant memory boxes.
After digging for dinosaur fossils in the giant sandpit - it's hot, but cloudy so being outside is more palatable, we call a Grab taxi to take us back to B Your Home, unfortunately getting bogged down in Bangkok’s infamous traffic - not yet a dream city.
Here we reclaim our luggage and the hotel kindly let us use the pool for an hour and then shower before walking back to the train station. As ever, the walk back to a station is so much easier than the original walk when you haven’t just stepped off transport and you don’t have moments of uncertainty of directions on each corner. This then gives us a reasonable hour before our train arrives at 7pm, though we’re by no means the first ones here - there are gaggles of travellers, young and old milling about the station platform.
We stock up on 7/11 snacks and a few rotis from a street seller for the 12 hour ride before our train pulls in promptly. This was a part of the trip Sienna had been looking forward to, because it was one of the few things we knew in advance would be happening and could show on the map. That said, I was a little nervous because the tickets I had bought online showed us in 4 upper berths - each pair of seats converting into a lower and upper bunk - and I also knew that officially kids under 150cm (both ours) weren’t allowed on the top bunk - so I’m relieved when we’re ushered on and after the tickets are rechecked onboard.
Kate manages to immediately swap with another passenger who also hadn’t been placed with her family so we were left with an upper and lower bunk above and below, an upper bunk one further along and then another diagonally opposite that. The kids couldn’t give two hoots and are both adamant they should each have an upper bunk, so Sienna goes above Kate, Seb above an American dad and me above an older gentleman from Bangkok.
The first thing Kate and I actually notice, barring the bed excitement, was how quiet and smooth the ride is compared to the other trains we’ve been on in the past few weeks. And they even close all the carriage doors from the rushing wind.
Passengers start having their seats converted into beds almost as soon as we’re moving, this only being just after 7pm. The kids are happy to stand and watch the well rehearsed procedure our carriage attendant goes through, sliding down the two seats that face each to become the base of the lower bunk, before unlocking the top bunk that unfolds down off the side of the train carriage. A thin mattress is covered with a sheet and a duvet and pillow are also provided. There are curtains to pull across to create our den for the night.
Eventually we get our own seats converted and it's into bed around 8:30pm - later than most in the carriage - the curtains for each bed are pulled across and we drift off to sleep with the gentle rocking motion of the train as it wends its way north to Chiang Mai.
