Flight Shaming
I did a double take as I found my train on the departures board at Bangkok's Krung Thep Aphiwat railway station, but unfortunately I had not made a mistake - my first taste of flygskam really was going to involve twenty-one hours in a railway carriage. Though it might sound like a tasty Scandinavian snack, flygskam is in fact Swedish for "flight shame," a movement that calls on people to ditch travel by plane in order to help save the planet. It’s had quite an impact on travel in Europe in recent years, with momentum there helped by the fact that travelling by high-speed train instead can result in similar or even shorter journey times once out-of-town airports and cumbersome security checks are factored in.
But could it catch on in Asia too? I had decided to find out on a trip from Bangkok to Singapore, a distance of about 1,800 kilometres that would normally take two and a half hours by plane. The land-based competition wasn’t looking promising though as, in that time, my train would only have completed a tenth of its total journey. And the kicker was that even when it did arrive at its destination, another eighteen hours later, I would still only be at Thailand’s southern border with Malaysia, which is as far as it’s possible to get on a direct train from Bangkok. Once I’d crossed over the frontier, I’d need to get a taxi to reach the railhead on the other side, then wait another eight hours for my next train. This would chug for a further sixteen hours all the way down the Malay Peninsula to the city of Johor Bahru as its tip. From there, I could finally make the short hop over the narrow strait that separates Malaysia from Singapore.
But thankfully slow travel has appeals in and of itself, one of the most alluring being that you get to truly experience the distances, landscapes and cultures that separate your departure and arrival points, served up as a gently rolling narrative. As I got underway, the expressways and high-rises of Bangkok gradually dissolved into villages and temples, then buffalo-specked rice paddies that sparkled in the afternoon sun. By the time that sun had set and then risen again, thick jungle had taken over as the backdrop outside the window and the temples had been replaced by mosques.
I was now clanking through Thaiand’s deep south where the majority Muslim population has long sought more autonomy from the rest of this predominantly Buddhist country, a struggle that has sadly turned more violent in recent years. A few months back, insurgents had blown up a train on this very track, and an army patrol along the line had been attacked shortly before the start of my journey. While I would have been oblivious to such events at 30,000 feet, as we arrived at the south’s Hat Yai Station, nervous-looking, heavily armed soldiers were patrolling the platform. Two of them then climbed into my carriage as the whistle blew and stayed there for the rest of the journey - a very real reminder of what was happening just outside the window.
Happier cultural insights also came on board in the form of mobile buffets, with food vendors clambering on at each station to speed-hawk their areas' culinary specialties, far eclipsing anything I could have hoped for from in-flight catering. Then, when I eventually disembarked, crossed the border, and got myself to the Malaysian railhead, my layover there beat any soulless airport coffee shop hands down as it included watching a cricket match and chatting to locals over tea out about everything from the recent harvest to upcoming provincial elections.
Back on board again, I could also indulge in the guilty pleasure of voyeuristic travel, as the separation that the train enforces from the outside world, the fact that you cannot just stop and interact with it, means that you can get away with much more staring. That insulation also means that train tracks don’t foster development around themselves like roads do, so you get to pass through the kind of remote country that you would never otherwise see.
Pushing on down the length of the Malay Peninsula, I soaked up the relaxed pace of small villages and quiet rural roads with their ambling livestock and meandering bicyclists. We then entered a seemingly endless maze of oil palm plantations that stretched on for hours. It brought home the environmental impact of this controversial crop's cultivation in a way that no statistic or report could ever have managed.
As I finally crossed the strait from Malaysia into Singapore, the contrast of the city-state's hyper-organization and clinical sheen jolted my senses, proclaiming its status as the region's precocious outlier in a way that never happened when I arrived by air.
Yes, it had taken two and a half days rather than two and a half hours, but I was no longer seeing the journey as a means to an end, but rather as part of the destination itself. After all, if we seek out new places because of our innate curiosity, our craving for the stimulus of something different, then why not make the journey a part of that too? It’s another reason why taking the plane can sometimes be a real shame.