31.01 Day 16 Train & Chiang Mai
Day 16 - Wed 31st Jan - Overnight train and Chiang Mai
In the bunk bed set up, only the lower bunk is able to see out of the window, as the upper bunk is flush to the carriage wall - which makes it hard to have a sense of time when waking from slumber, especially when the corridor lights are left on all night and sunset and sunrise happen around 7pm and 7am - it's a bit like being in a casino with no windows and no clocks and so no sense of time.
The first stirring of passengers starts soon after 5:00am and the first walk past of the worker from the onboard dining cart spruiking “coffee and juice, coffee and juice” at 5:30am gets a few more curtains opened. However, Kate and Seb have to be woken around 6:00am such is their comfort, as our carriage attendant starts converting the beds back into seats.
That leaves the last hour and half of the journey to nibble on some light breakfast as the daylight filters through the low lying mist revealing a gradual build up of houses until we reach Chiang Mai, the end of the line.
Ignoring the pleas of the waiting drivers who stand behind an invisible line outside the station building, thankfully not allowed in to the station proper, we get a Grab taxi to take us (slowly; Chiang Mai is not immune to school runs and commuter congestion) to our hostel for one night - Home De Bear, in the south west corner of the Old Town.
A lady who does not pause from working for the 24 hours we see her points to the 2pm Check In sign, not particularly impressed it seems by our 8am arrival. This small hostel with two rows of four cottage units, has no swimming pool or spare showers like B Your Home, so it's back out into the world for us, still slightly smelly from the overnight train.
A cafe nearby with 218 google reviews of which 217 are 5 star (the other is 4 star) is just about good enough for our high standards, so we plump ourselves down at Sweet Home Coffee as their first customers of the day. Like many of the cafes and small restaurants or takeaway venues, the seating area is really just the space of the front yard of the owner’s house. The exceptionally polite and kind lady serves up coffee, tea, strawberry smoothie and mango smoothie - the last of which comes with a side of half a mango adorned with a pair of rose petals. This time it’s not just the kids immediately asking to come back to “the kind lady cafe,” it's all of us.
Only five hours to burn now. To explore the Old Town a little, which is a square island encircled by a narrow canal (about 30 minutes to walk from one side to the other), we walk to Wat Phra Singh Woramahawihan, eliciting more comments from Seb about how much they like gold in Thailand.
The raised square base of one large chedi has the front half of a near life size elephant protruding from it as though it had been caught walking through a golden waterfall. There are some smaller contrasting buildings like a library from the 15th century, with a far more subdued black timber and white panelling in sharp contrast to the main temple hall.
From there we manage to extract one more temple out of the kids, the Wat Chedi Luang with an impressive centrepiece with irregular edges such that from afar I thought that the temple had been carved out of a freestanding outcrop of rock.
After an early lunch, we’re allowed into our room, everyone grateful for a shower. A quiet afternoon to follow with the longest sleepers on the train, Kate and Seb, somehow still needing a one and two hour nap respectively. Dinner out nearby from an old lady who seemingly had had her fill of tourists 15 years ago and off to bed.
