Nara The overnight train north leaves in the evening and arrives in the morning, which is the whole point. You fall asleep in one city and wake up in a cooler one.
I booked a lower berth because I wanted the window. When the attendant came round to make up the beds, he folded the seats into a bunk in about twenty seconds, snapped on clean sheets and pulled a curtain across like a magic trick. My own little room: a reading light, a hook for my jacket, dark rice fields sliding past.
I didn't sleep much. I didn't want to.
Somewhere before dawn the train started to climb. The air through the gap in the window turned cold enough to make me pull the blanket up to my chin, หนาวแล้ว, and when the sky came up it was the colour of weak tea, with mist lying in the valleys like someone had spilled milk.
from the same roll
Chiang Mai in the morning is slow. I walked from the station with no plan. A market was half awake: baskets of sticky rice steaming under cloth, sausages on a grill that smelled of lemongrass and pepper, an auntie arranging marigolds into neat orange hills. I bought sticky rice in a little bamboo basket and ate it with my fingers on a low plastic stool, the way you should.
Later, one of the red trucks took me up toward the hills. I sat in the back with a grandmother, her grandson, and a man holding a bag of oranges. Nobody talked. Everybody smiled when we hit a bump.
I wore the leather jacket the whole trip. In Bangkok it lives on a hook. Up here it finally gets to do its job.
the souvenir · kept
An overnight train ticket
Second class sleeper, car 7, berth 23, lower. The paper is thin and the ink has already started to fade, which feels right. It was a night I don't fully remember, in the best way: half dream, half window.
If you go, take the train. Bring a jacket. Don't sleep.
— nara