Transit City
Bangkok — Train Markets
& Canal Walks
The overnight sleeper from Laos, Bang Sue Grand Station, trackside shanty towns, banyan trees swallowing houses, and a tuk-tuk covered in nightclub ads.
Arrival
Bang Sue Grand Station
We crossed the Friendship Bridge from Vientiane into Nong Khai at dusk, boarded the overnight sleeper, and woke up in Bangkok. The train pulled into Bang Sue Grand Station — Thailand’s newest railway terminus, opened in 2023 to replace the historic Hua Lamphong station that had served the city since 1916.
Bang Sue Grand is enormous. Southeast Asia’s largest railway station: twelve platforms, high-speed rail connections to the north, and a soaring roof that makes you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere that matters. A classic Thai railway carriage sits alongside the modern terminal — old meeting new in the way Bangkok always does.
The Back Streets
Trackside Communities & Canal Walks
The Bangkok nobody puts on postcards lives along the railway tracks and canal banks. Trackside communities — houses built so close to the rails you could reach out and touch the trains — have existed here for decades, long before the shiny new station arrived. Washing lines cross the tracks. Kids play on the sleepers. Life continues six feet from a freight train.
Further in, the khlongs — Bangkok’s canal communities — reveal a city built on water. Narrow alleyways twist between concrete walls, motorbikes squeezed into spaces that shouldn’t fit them, laundry hanging from every surface. A banyan tree has spent decades engulfing a derelict wooden house, its roots pouring over the walls like slow-motion lava. Nature reclaiming what the city forgot.
Next Stop
Kaohsiung — Hash, Cijin & Lanterns
Taiwan’s southern port city: hash running, island temples, and sky lanterns at night.
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