A Stone's Throw in Nong Khai

The night train leaving Bangkok winds so slowly through conglomerate bidonville and the vagrant beauty of suburban stations.

If, for me this trip were a state imposed chore, Kit, aged 7, felt the simple excitement of the upper bunk and other curious passengers. I remember a younger child who cried much before he amused her and us eating inconsequential snacks, sleeping till the morning clatter, then Udon

From there to Nong Khai always seems a ‘rails and platforms’ afterthought, the real journey already completed, only this epilogue to negotiate. Carrying goods, and a few passengers, past shaggy scrub, or fishermen immersed in fetid pools, and the occasional buffalo wallow.

The final station is modern and underused to a fault. I usually shower there through the battered wash room turnstile and we did so this time, seeing most of the falang head raggedly and perhaps apprehensive to the border. We joined them later, clean, and fed by the stalls raked jauntily opposite the concourse.

Back within the hour, free to wait for the return train that evening and rent a motorbike from the German run café on the main street running alongside the Mekong.

Veterans of two wheels, staying faithful to the river, until on the right the gaudy colours of a Wat, I turned into the compound on impulse.

The lithe orange novices were burning debris; brush, rubbish, tired bunting even, which made the ubiquitous stark dried white mud untidy. Kit was intrigued and we formally dismounted.

Party tomorrow they told us infectiously. We drifted toward the water’s edge, suddenly so steeply sloping as to be almost terraced. Exuberant lumber floated below, jostling the shore though we hardly saw the small indigenous figure squatting there too.

What possessed him to start hurling stones?

Mortification as one struck and I entertained the banality of tragedy.

Five years on a gentler child you would go far to find. While remorsefully, we sometimes recall that day of fickle consequence and banquet circumstance.

© Icarus. All rights reserved by the author.

Download