Then I climbed on a train with no doors or windows, I took the local train instead of the expensive airconditioned tourist train.
Climbed on board and crawled over a pile of 50lb rice sacks, and one sleeping old man, and sat down on a wooden bench seat.
Soon the old man awakes, looks at me, smiles a huge toothless grin and yells, "farang!!" (foreigner) I smile, say sadeekup, and he commences to giving me boozy breathed hugs and talking a million miles an hour in Thai. Soon his buddy comes over and does the same.
Well I am having fun, and boozy bums never scared me, so I pretend to understand, with lots of backpatting, handshaking, and plenty of whoopees and yeehaws.
Soon they both pass out again and I wait for my station at monkey town.
My destination is only 3 hrs away but after about 5 hours I start attempting to get some help. Of course everyone smiles and nods, but noone understands me. Finally someone says "you ticket, rachaburi!" I say "uh no, lopburi??"
And thats when the lightbulb came on. Crap.
5 hours down the line and I have the wrong ticket, I don't even know if I went north, south, or anything...
Eh, oh well!!
guess I better find out where I'm at...
So I hop out at next station fight off taxi drivers and find a place to hide.
Turns out the map shows that I'm headed straight towards ko pha-ngan island which just so happens to be the number one beach I wanted to see.
Funny thing is, I couldn't decide last night if I wanted to go north to the jungles, or south to the islands, so I just flipped a coin. But now that I'm on my way to the beach I am actually really glad. I love the ocean more than monkeys. But Barely.
So I catch a bicycle taxi into town, throw down some chow, and now I'm under a shade tree beside the tracks waiting for the train.
I guess the moral of this story is you don't always have to know where your going to get there on time...
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