by Alex Gunn
We lurched forward, the train crawling for a few more moments, and then there was an alarming and shuddering halt. Even the fans went off for a while. Not that they were doing any good. People began to open the doors and walk down the tracks. It looked like we had come to a standstill just in front of a station. We waited to see if everybody was getting off, but some got off and some stayed put. I really wished there was someone to ask what was happening. One man got off and walked into what seemed like nothing, just a bleak area off waste ground underneath an elevated highway. It was the sort of place where I imagined our first web site was located.
My wife wanted to get off, but I was less sure. She ignored my dithering and started to gather our bags and children, “I’m getting off this bloody train.” My mind raced in panic. It just didn’t feel like a good thing to do. At least staying on the train from hell would mean that at some point in our lives we would reach the mythical Shangri-La of Hua Hin. Getting off the train would mean living under the elevated super highway with the mad dogs and glue sniffers. As we got off the train, with all our luggage, (we have never perfected the art of travelling “light”) looking like we were in the middle of some terrible fever, I noticed that people weren’t actually walking to any station but just drifting off towards a few shacks and a distant single road. “Get back on the train” I said as I practically pushed my wife and zombie like kids back up the steps into the carriage. “There’s no station, we’re nowhere.”
It’s quite a weird feeling being nowhere, but that moment on that train was the closest I have ever got to it, on the edge of some distant ring road on the edge of some outlying industrial zone, on the edge of Bangkok. It was as nowhere as I’ve ever been and I’m bloody glad we didn’t get off the train. Eventually we slowly shunted off again and actually began to build up a little speed. Once out of Bangkok we crept along at a stately pace, small children on bicycles would probably be able to keep up with us, but at least we didn’t keep stopping.
The country side gave way to palm trees, odd and dramatic rocky outcrops, small herds of dirty water buffalo, shocks of bright red Canna Lillies, flocks of pure white Egrets and the occasional green banana plantation. As we trundled ever southwards night began to fall. We were into our fifth hour on the hell train. I had almost forgotten what we were all doing there and where we were going.
In complete darkness we arrived at the historical train station at Hua Hin. I wearily forced myself to look at the picturesque 1920s station building, but felt nothing. We got in a taxi, and gave the name of some cheap hotel my wife had found. We drove along the darkened back streets of Hua Hin.
It was a small and bizarre hotel and our room was clearly the badly converted corridor of what was once quite a nice house by the sea. I didn’t have the energy to complain and we fell asleep with the relentless rattle of the train still rumbling through our heads.
Quite wonderfully though, as a result of spending nearly seven hours on the train I laboured under the misapprehension that Hua Hin was miles and miles away. I really did think that we were in some remote part of the deep south. When we returned a few weeks later I was shocked that it’s only a two and a half hour drive, and for only 200B you can get a seat in a zippy modern air conditioned mini bus that shoot backwards and forwards every other minute, or there about.
In the morning we got up, and got going. We took the public bus from somewhere in the town, found seats, put our luggage on our laps and sat there until my wife told us to get off. God knows how she knew when to get off, she must have had a quiet word with the driver when I wasn’t looking. I was too tired to really care. She hissed at me across the bus, “this is it, we need to get off”. We clambered off and stood at the side of a busy dual carriage way that looked like it could have been anywhere. The sea certainly didn’t seem anywhere nearby. It was late afternoon and it began raining.
We were standing at the side of a busy road with trucks and buses thundering past, with 2 little boys, far too much luggage, with no map, not a clue where we were, unable to speak the language, with limited cash and it was pouring with rain. We huddled in a leaking open sided shack by the side of the road. We really must have been a sorry sight. If ever, in the unlikely event, the Tourist Authority of Thailand wanted to produce a picture to dissuade families coming to Thailand, that would have been it.
About 100 yards away off on a slip road I could see a little row of shophouses. I decided to trudge up to it to see if I could find out where we were and where the beach was. It seemed incredibly unlikely that we were anywhere near a beach. As I got closer to the little row of shops I could see the shop on the corner, it seemed to be selling bits of broken motorbike parts; wheels, dirty exhausts and other greasy engine parts hung from an awning. I went into the shop to the astonishment of the girl sitting inside watching TV. It was just the front room of a house really and I was standing in the middle of it. Without a word I left and trudged back to my huddling family. I was completely and absolutely soaking wet.
As I got back to the shack a bloke on a motor bike turned up wearing a big plastic rain poncho. He said something in Thai and drove off. He returned with two other blokes wearing brightly coloured rain ponchos and set about organizing us and our stuff onto the backs of the little bikes. It felt as dangerous as you could possibly get and something that we would never have even entertained a year ago but now seemed perfectly normal. We obediently got on the bikes, me on one, my wife on another and our boys on the third and weaved dangerously through the pouring rain, with no crash helmets, balancing children and luggage precariously as best we could. Where would Thailand be without those hook ended bungee straps?
By the time we reached the little place we were headed for, it stopped raining and the sun was coming out. After travelling for two days on public transport we arrived at the Beach Garden Bungalows at the most beautiful beach I have ever seen in my life. It really was like the postcards. Clean fine white sand, palm trees leaning over crystal clear water and hardly any other people. After we checked into our little beach hut I went off for a quick look around the area, sniffing out potential places to eat and any supplies we might need and just to get over the journey.
I watched as my youngest son ran for pure joy along the beach at the edge of the sea. Our little beautiful blonde haired boy against this huge un-spoilt beautiful backdrop of sand and sea. As he ran, a huge gliding bird swooped down over his head, “look daddy, I’m racing an eagle” he yelled. I thought of calling back that it wasn’t an eagle but a Brahminy Kite but just had the feeling that it’s sometimes important not to correct your children and just enjoy them racing an eagle.
I walked along a deserted beach road with just a handful of closed up shacks and a small shophouse that sold the obligatory instant noodles, crisps, beer and soap powder. There was hardly anybody about except a few fishermen who were fiddling with their boats, and a young holidaying Thai couple who were paddling about in the waves some distance away in front of me.
Suddenly and quite alarmingly a dog rushed up to me from some waste ground barking furiously and foaming at the mouth. I’m not good with dogs at the best of times but I thought I should ignore it and kept on walking pretending it wasn’t happening. This seemed to wind it up into a complete frenzy and it bit me on the back off the leg and ran off. It wasn’t a terrible bite, it didn’t feel serious, I could still walk okay, but there was a steady little trickle of blood onto my flip flop.
I limped about swearing for a bit not quite knowing what to do. While I was hopping about the young couple ran over from the sea edge to see if I was okay. They looked concerned and offered to take me to hospital, which I remember thinking was a terribly kind offer as they were clearly in the middle of a romantic trip out together. I politely refused of course as I’m male and English and would therefore rather risk death than seek medical attention in a hospital. The man reached into a cool bag and offered me can of beer, which of course I accepted be
ing male and English. I walked back to the small hotel with my can of beer, stopping occasionally to dab my leg with a tissue which they had also kindly given me.
My wife was alarmed and my children interested. My wife wanted to know whether the dog was foaming at the mouth and my children wanted to know if I actually fought with the dog. Happily I was able to say no to both these questions (only lying a bit) and settled down on the balcony of our little cabin to drink my free gift.
In the morning my leg didn’t look good. It was swollen, yellow and hurt like hell. It still didn’t occur to me that I really did need to go to hospital for proper medical treatment.
This medical blind spot is, I think, shared by most men the world over. It’s part of the secret alliance of husbands, an ancient unwritten understanding between all men, that one of the many perks of getting married is the free medical care administered by wives. Over the past twenty one years my wife has successfully extracted things from my eyes, bandaged a badly sprained ankle with a T Shirt in the car park of a Safari Park, extracted a nasty glass splinter from my foot on a Spanish beach and administered endless ointments and provided plasters and tablets for all kinds of aches, pains, bangs and bruises. It was only when my wife said that I might have Rabies which she wouldn’t be able to cure with cotton wool and stingy stuff that the tide of denial began to recede.
The nice lady behind the reception desk of the beach bungalows made a few phone calls and managed to rustle up a taxi. I limped in the back. After 20 minutes bumping about in the back of the cab we arrived at a military hospital that only seemed to provide limited access for the public, probably only for real emergencies. It clearly wasn’t geared up for poorly foreigners with poorly legs.
The driver talked to the heavily armed men on the gate and we were waved through and on to the next check point. Luckily, having spent about nine months in Thailand I had automatically put my passport in my pocket, which was then asked for and taken away, I suspected for a bit of impromptu photocopying, just be on the safe side. It was returned and we were waved on. The taxi driver quite liked it all.
We got to the main building. There was nobody about. There was a small reception hatch but nobody on duty. I limped straight past and wandered into what looked like the main entrance and corridor. There was still nobody in sight. I wandered along the corridor a bit and into a big glass sided room that might have been a waiting room. Along the full length of the far wall there was an impressive poster display of various types of snakes, about 20 pictures in total. I imagined all the soldiers that had stood where I was standing, desperately trying to remember whether they were bitten by a brown snake with black stripes or a black snake with brown stripes.
I stood for some time making a mental note that if ever I was bitten by a snake I would take very careful notice of its markings. As I was perusing the rogues gallery of snakes the door opened behind me and a young male nurse came in, he was clearly momentarily startled by my unexpected presence and jumped slightly. He spoke perfect English in a soft voice with a slight American accent. He asked me to wait outside and register at reception. He indicated towards the reception hatch that I had walked straight past.
I hadn’t noticed that below the bottom of the sliding window, the other side of the wall, sat two, very quiet, very small, young female receptionists. On my re-approach they sprung up like two glove puppets in a booth and said loads of things to me in Thai that I didn’t understand. It was remarkably surreal, and I wondered whether they sit hidden out of sight below the hatch waiting to spring up like puppets every day, in which case it’s almost worth getting bitten by a dog just to see. I pointed to my wounded leg and handed them my passport. I signed some papers, had my passport photocopied again which they asked me to countersign, and took a seat back in the Snake Gallery.
Very quickly the same softly spoken nurse appeared again without any recognition that we had met but moments before. He greeted me cordially and took me through to a very, very young looking doctor in an adjoining spotlessly clean room. He was extremely kind, also spoke perfect English and examined my leg with the sensitivity of a bomb disposal expert. He was very sorry that I had been bitten, and apologised profusely. He really was a very gentle, kind young man.
He told me it was infected and prescribed some antibiotics and said he needed to give me two injections, one antibiotic and one for Rabies. This didn’t sound so good but I really didn’t feel the injections at all. I was still waiting for them after he had finished and was probably wondering what I was waiting for but was too polite to ask. So we both stood in silence for quite some time as though we were in a rather laboured production of a Samuel Beckett play.
Before I left he gave me an appointment card for my next four follow up injections at varying intervals over the next couple of weeks which happened to coincided with us being at four different places in the south of Thailand and therefore four different hospitals. I paid a relatively small sum for the injections, a big bag of antibiotics and some other tablets which I didn’t understand (but didn’t worry about as my wife would), thanked everyone profusely and found my dozing taxi driver in the shade of a tree in a huge and empty car park.
Whether this hospital is always deserted or may perhaps at times be full of snake bitten, and badly wounded soldiers I have no idea, but it was excellent.
The next two weeks proved to be a very interesting mix of remote unspoilt beaches, some memorable small sea food restaurants, endless coconut and pineapple plantations and the waiting rooms of government hospitals.
Invariably the care that I received at all but one of the hospitals was outstanding. Having accompanied my elderly mother in law to the emergency department of London’s Middlesex Hospital at Christmas time during a flu epidemic I have experienced, at first hand the full horror of complete medical meltdown and chaos. Nothing that we experienced in Thailand even came close. With one exception nurses and doctors were polite, thoughtful and courteous.
The one exception was a young surly nurse in Hua Hin on our return, who I suspected was not a nurse at all but on the run from a nearby Swenson’s ice cream parlour. She had the same elaborate make up, pimples and blank expression that seems to be in vogue in most ice cream parlours the world over. She certainly didn’t have much of a clue about injections and seemed unusually confused about the whole process, lurching towards me as though she was slightly drunk and stabbing me without warning in the arm. It seemed to surprise her as much as me. It hurt for days afterwards.
The best hospital that we went to was the government hospital in Prachapkirikhan. We found it behind the main high street early on a Sunday morning and mistakenly thought it would be nice and quiet. In fact it was a hive of busy activity as a result of a particularly rowdy town celebration the night before.
There had been a big stage and disco lights on the sea front with some extremely impressive karaoke, the particularly good singers being encouraged to stay on by extravagant financial incentives by their friends and the rest of the crowd. Everyone seemed to know each other and were clearly waiting for various celebrity members of their community to get up and sing.
One young guy in old jeans and T shirt was absolutely fantastic. He could not only sing and dance like a professional but knew how to whip the crowd up into frenzy. The old man next to me leant over and said “he is best motor mechanic in town.” I replied “he is best pop star” which pleased him greatly and he gave me a cigarette although I don’t smoke. There was a standing ovation when he finished and finally waved the crowd goodbye.
Later on there was also a troupe of professional young female dancers in skimpy outfits, probably hired to keep the dads awake. I thought it was great and wanted to stay on but my wife said it was about time to get the children to bed and such sights might give me a heart attack or at the very least indigestion. She was, as always, right. The loud music and dancing went on late into the night, fuelled by excessive Thai whisky consu
mption as evidenced by the various sorry states that were falling about (quite literally) in the hospital early the next morning. I think there had also been some bad traffic accidents, again probably caused by a flagrant disregard of the strength of the local brew, giving the early morning staff more than their fair share of work.
Doctors and nurses where running in all directions. I thought I might be there all day but amazingly despite all the action I was seen quickly by a very nice doctor who greeted me, led me off into a little booth, injected my arm and saw me on my way in what felt like one graceful and seamless movement.
Walking back to the hotel I realized that Thailand does medical care really very well. I don’t know why it should be so surprising when you consider Thailand’s ancient tradition, and understanding of herbal medicine and holistic care which along with a genuine sensitivity and thoughtfulness makes an impressive combination.
I like to think of Thailand as the herbal medical cabinet of the world, producing and exporting more fresh ginger, garlic, chilli, galangal, lemon grass, sweet basil, coconut oil, papaya, limes and a whole host of other health giving super foods than any of its Asian neighbours. Thailand has been using all these in abundance as medicine and food for centuries and is doing very well. It’s not surprising that they take so easily to modern western medical care and have a booming industry of medical tourism.