Flight Shaming
I did a double as I located my train on the departures board at Bangkok's Krung Thep Aphiwat railway station. Unfortunately though I had not made a mistake - my first taste of flygskam really was going to involve a twenty-one-hour journey.
Though it might sound like a tasty Scandinavian snack, flygskam is actually Swedish for "flight shame," a movement that calls on people to ditch flying in order to help save the planet and that has had quite an impact on how people travel in Europe. Its momentum has been helped by the fact that there taking a high-speed train there instead of a plane can result in similar or even shorter journey times once travel to out-of-town airports and security checks are factored in.
But could it also work in Asia? I had decided to find out on a trip from Bangkok to Singapore, a distance of about 1,800 kilometres that would take two and a half hours by plane. In that time though, my train would have covered a mere tenth of its total journey. And the kicker was that even when I did alight, another eighteen hours later, I would only be at Thailand’s border with Malaysia as this is as far as it is possible to go on a direct train from Bangkok.
Once I crossed that frontier, I would need to get a taxi to reach the railhead on the other side and then have an eight-hour wait. Then it was a further sixteen-hours on a train all the way down the Malay Peninsula to Johor Bahru. From there I would be able make the final short hop over the narrow strait that separates Malaysia from Singapore. An absolute no contest with the plane in the times stakes then.
But thankfully slow travel can have its own appeal. For a start, you get a real sense of 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 glistening 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set and then risen again, thick jungle had taken over as the backdrop outside the carriage window and the temples had been replaced by mosques.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, the struggle sadly turning more violent in recent years. A few months back, insurgents blew up a train on this very track and an army patrol along the line had been attacked shortly before the start of my present 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 patrolled the platform and two of them proceeded to join my carriage for the rest of the journey to the border, a very real reminder of what was going on just outside the window.
Happier cultural insights also came aboard in the form of mobile buffets as food vendors clambered on at each station to speed-hawk their areas' culinary specialties, far eclipsing anything I would have been offered by in-flight catering. Once I’d disembarked, crossed the border, and got myself down to the Malaysian railhead, my layover there also beat any soulless airport coffee shop hands down given that it included watching a cricket match and then chatting to locals over tea out about everything from the recent harvest to upcoming provincial elections.
Back on board, I could instead 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 you can get away with much more staring. This insulation also means train tracks do not foster development around themselves like roads do, so passengers get to pass through the kind of remote country that they 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. I 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 waters from Malaysia into into Singapore, the contrast of the city-state's hyper-organization and clinical sheen rattled my senses, heralding its status as the region's precocious outlier in a way that never seemed to happen 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.