An episode in which plans change

So the universe said Chiang Mai. Or rather, the universe said, “Here’s a test of your patience. Spend three days trying to get to where you want to be. Be open to changing your itinerary, revising all your plans, and going with your gut—at 5am, standing on an unknown street in Bangkok.”


After attempting for two days to find and book a bus ticket to Kanchanaburi, I ended up on a bus bound for Bangkok, expecting then to take a bus to Kanchanaburi. After a few days, I'd bus from there to Chiang Mai. But 14 hours on buses provides plenty of time for thinking, including mapping out an agenda, and counting days, and realizing that it had not, actually, been five weeks since I arrived in Ton Sai. It has been six. And now there are a mere two weeks between me and Visa expiration. My list of things to do in Kanchanaburi was good… but my list of things to do in Chiang Mai included rock climbing. And was, in general, longer. So the choice made after fitful sleep on a bus rolling across Thailand was Chiang Mai.

From that unknown street, I took my first tuktuk ride to the Bangkok train station and booked a ticket on the 8:30am train to Chiang Mai. That gave me a few hours to buy a cup of coffee and take a table at a cafe on the second floor of the train station, overlooking the passenger waiting area, and write out my new itinerary on a napkin from the coffee shop.




The train station tripped memories of the semester I spent in London, stumbling through Victoria Station on Saturday mornings, so desperate for coffee and pasties we’d risk missing the train just to stop for them. The station was already busy at 6am. Waiting passengers were lined up in red plastic chairs in sets of four—four chairs, a narrow aisle, four chairs, a wide center aisle, four chairs, a narrow aisle, four chairs. They all face the same direction and look like they’re practicing for their impending travel, their two trains lined up at the starting line before breaking off for different destinations. As I walked to my train, the national anthem started to play, and everyone stood up or stopped walking--or walked just far enough to get out of the pouring rain, waited while it pealed out. The world on pause.

The moment it stopped, they took off again, the train attendants (like flight attendants) ahead of me clacking along in their high heels.


We cruised through Bangkok suburbs, passing shacks squeezed along the railway lines and people who emerge in miraculously clean clothes from those squatting shelters. Then housing gave way to tall grasses, then hours and hours of the luminescent fields of rice paddies, where the reflection of the sun off the standing water makes the blades seem to glow. Seven hours into the journey, the sound of the train engine changed as we started to head uphill, chugging laboriously. The track wandered among steep hillsides and flickered in and out of tunnels, at times so close to rock walls and the encroaching jungle they would have been easy to reach had I put a hand out the window.

We passed skeletal forests, bare-limbed trees with the sun setting behind them. Red and yellow leaves still clung to some trees. It looked autumnal, but it was like a brief visit to the season. A glimpse at the month of October.

After nightfall, my head too full and stomach too empty to read, I started pacing the train. Enter the Australians, a trio of university students on holiday standing on one of the train couplings, smoking and drinking beers. They’d invited every English-speaker they met that day—and there had been plenty as they had trolled the train cars earlier, searching for the beer now in their hands—to join them for dinner. I got the invite, a scrawled note with the restaurant's name and address.

Another tuktuk scrambled my brain driving circles through Chiang Mai, slamming around corners in dark, narrow alleyways, carting me to an area of town thick with guesthouses and signs for tourist treks. I dumped my bags, emailed home to let people know I was not, in fact, going to Kanchanaburi, and then headed out to walk through the Sunday Walking Street on my way to dinner.
This street market takes over downtown and is so thick with people it's like the holiday-shopping shuffle every step of the way. I tried working through the crowd, got lost, got slowed down, and finally hailed yet another tuktuk and flashed him that scribbled address.

Away we went, once again around the back alleys and racing by the river until I was deposited at the restaurant, taking a seat at a riverside table for 10, and soon enough lost in conversation with strangers.