September 2006. On a train bound for Thailand’s southern provinces.

I hopped out of the top-berth of the southbound train to see the cabin illuminated by an orange glow that was still below the horizon. People rise early in the jungle on account of the oppressive heat. Even then, before 6am, the fierceness of the oncoming sun was well established. I was awoken by the train’s first stop of the day, when the rhythmic clack and sway of sheer momentum gave in to the brakes with one final lunge forward of everything in the train- but not the train itself.

The steward was making his rounds to fold up the bunks. I was hungry, but had found out the night before that there was no dining car on this train. There were women moving from carriage to carriage hawking various local foods, but since I could identify them neither by sight nor spoken word, I decided to pass. I was intrigued by these hawkers though; as best as I could tell, they hopped onboard the moment the train stopped and made an expeditious journey through all the train’s cars, always mindful to be out the door before the train pulled away again. No tickets, no sales tax, no guarantee of hygiene, just an unencumbered style of laissez-faire capitalism known as “sabai sabai.”

Since the steward had not yet made my seat available, I decided to have a smoke. I made a cup of instant hot coffee with a ubiquitous electric kettle, and decided the small platform between cars of the now-moving train would do just fine. I was wrong. Turns out the platform between train cars –or at least on Thai trains- is extremely loud, gritty, and oh-so-shaky. A bit like standing on a runway while a 747 touches down during an earthquake. With most of my coffee now on my crotch and a look of recently passed impending doom on my face, I lunged into the other car, showed a stewardess my cigarette, and mumbled, “Where I go?” in Thai as best I could. She politely led me to the toilet.

What happened next is one of the strongest music-as-memory associations I’ve ever had, best opened with an, “So there I was…”

So there I was, standing in a four-foot-square, stainless steel toilet-stall on a train somewhere along the Malay Peninsula. It’s logically deductible that toilets as we know them are uncommon in those parts, because this one had a diagram over it of the stick figure type that’s meant to transcend the need for written language. Inside a red circle was a stick figure with its feet on the toilet seat squatting over the bowl. Inside a green circle was a stick man dutifully sitting upon the seat. Considering the overall state of the stall, I don’t think those directions had been displayed prominently enough. I scouted out two dry patches of floor, hit play on my iPod, leaned on the sill of the open-air, barred window, and lit my cigarette.

As Welcome to the Jungle serendipitously came to my ears, I leaned forward and pressed my face between the bars to better see the world that I was passing through. I grew up in Western New York, spent some time in other parts of the States, and had recently finished a contract on the harshest of continents, Antarctica. Now I was bound for a city well below the Tropic of Cancer. When that thought sank in I shook the sardonic grin off my face and conceded that I may just finally be in over my head. But I’d happened upon a path in life I believed would be enriching, at least in the long run: to put myself in as many parts of the world as I could muster by the time I turned 30. If the rhythm and flow of life brought me to a place such as this, then so be it. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

This world was one of field after flooded field of what I assume was rice. For the people in those paddies, life was one of backbreaking toil. Shin-deep in water, they worked from the earth with their heads wrapped in cloth to block the sun. There were pickup trucks laden with a dozen people humming down the dusty roads that bisected the fields. Clumps of lush trees bared strange looking fruits and birds I could only imagine seeing in zoos. The ditch along the tracks was full of trash in what I would later learn to be a peculiar contrast of Thai society: their homes are spotless and constantly tended to, but the cleanliness of anything outside is apparently the responsibility of some guy who’s permanently on vacation.

The feeling of heat and the smell of wet earth are strong to me even today. I’m often struck with a thought of what I can best describe as global simplicity: no matter where you are on this planet, people who may be utterly foreign to you are nonetheless doing the same thing as you- they’re going about their everyday lives. Life in that stretch of southern Thailand was remote, it was foreign… it was a jungle.

An hour later I reached my destination of Hat Yai, where my new boss picked me up and brought me to Songkhla, where I would live out the next chapter of my life- teaching English in Thailand. When you move to a new city in a new part of the world that also happens to be in the tropics, learning your way around a new local grocery store is just the beginning. There’s also the question of whether the sound drifting through your window in the morning is a bird the size of a gargoyle or an insect as vicious as one.

Welcome to the Jungle indeed…

‘Music As Memory’ is an intermittent series about the memories that inevitably come to mind when hearing a certain song.

Brian Spigel is a reformed world traveler based in Portland, Maine, USA. After stints in various American national parks, Antarctica, Thailand, Australia, and the Appalachian Trail, he is currently attempting to live a so-called normal life in Portland, Maine.