Green morning
October 27th, 2009Buffaloes peacefully grazing in the fields. Kids on their bicycles racing each other on their way to school. Marine uniforms. Farmers at work since sunset, ordering rice paddies, cleaning and digging out new sprouts, carrying on their never-tiring backs huge loads of either firewood or tools, bags of rice, gallons of oil or branches and branches of fresh tea leaves.
From my train window, this all scenery is like a garden of Eden, green landscapes of moving forms, quiet living beings carrying out their day as they did the day before and as they probably will the next. Some passengers are still asleep but despite the early hour – it’s half past five only – most of us are wide awake, taking in the passing world as morning coffee: sipping slowly the peacefulness, the bright colours of an Asian sunrise. The orange-red of the first sunlight over the green of the rice-fields littered hills of eastern Thailand.
The doors are wide open and some are already sitting there on the train steps, smoking home-made cigarettes, chatting away the last of the way. Beds are being unmade, turning back into their seat-like form for the day to come. Only two hours left and we’re in Laos. Same green hills there I heard. Hemingway wrote about the African ones. Much greener, much more widespread, green hills of South-East Asia. So green they blind you, so fresh and alive with vegetation and wildlife and people and emotion they make you smile. With that our our faces, we got off the train and hitched a ride to the Laotian border 100 km East. Goodbye green hills of Siam, hello green hills of Laos!