Samut Songkhram

The most enjoyable way of travelling to Samut Songkhram is by train from Bangkok – a scenic, albeit rather convoluted, route that has three stages, involves going via Samut Sakhon and could take up to three hours. It’s a very unusual line, being single track and for much of its route literally squeezed in between homes, palms and mangroves, and, most memorably, between market stalls, so that at both the Samut Sakhon and Samut Songkhram termini the train really does chug to a standstill amid the trays of seafood.

Trains to Samut Sakhon leave approximately hourly from Bangkok’s Wongwian Yai station in southern Thonburi (which is within walking distance of Wongwian Yai Skytrain station), but for the fastest onward connections catch the 5.30am, 8.35am, 12.15pm or 3.25pm (1hr). The train pulls up right inside the wet market at Samut Sakhon, also known as Mahachai, where you need to take a ferry across the Maenam Tha Chin to get the connecting train from Ban Laem on the other bank. Once you’ve left the train, cross the track and continue in the same direction as the train was going, through a clothes market, until you emerge onto a shopping street. Cross the street to the five-storey, blue-painted Tarua Restaurant, right on the estuary, adjacent to the busy fishing port, where you’ll find two piers. Boats from both piers will get you across the river: those departing from the pier on the right of the restaurant are frequent but drop you directly across on the other bank, from where it’s a twenty-minute walk to Ban Laem station (turn right and walk upriver, past a Thai temple); boats from the pier on the left of the restaurant go direct to Ban Laem station (5min), but leave infrequently, being timed to coincide with the Ban Laem trains. There are only four trains a day in each direction from Ban Laem to Samut Songkhram at the end of the line (1hr), a journey through marshes, lagoons, prawn farms, salt flats and mangrove and palm growth. Once again, at Samut Songkhram, the station is literally enveloped by the town-centre market, with traders gathering up their goods and awnings from the trackside for the arrival and departure of the service.

Seafood is the obvious regional speciality in these parts, with the most famous local dish being hoi lot pat cha, a spicy stir-fry that centres round the tubular molluscs, known as hoi lot or “worm shells”, that are harvested in their sackloads at low tide from a muddy sandbank known as Don Hoi Lot at the mouth of the Mae Khlong estuary. This is probably the most famous spot in the province to eat seafood, and a dozen restaurants occupy the area around the nearby pier, many offering views out over the Gulf and its bountiful sandbar. Don Hoi Lot is served by frequent songthaews from Samut Songkhram market (15–20min); the restaurants are usually open daily during daylight hours.

On market days and during the week, when the waterways are far quieter, you can take a longtail boat tour around Amphawa (around B500/boat/hr) – boats wait on the canal, just over the bridge from the memorial park. If you get the chance, it’s well worth venturing out onto the canals after dark to watch the fireflies twinkling romantically in their favourite lamphu trees like delicate strings of fairylights; any boatman will ferry you to the right spot for around B60 per head, but you may need to link up with others to get a good price. For boat tours in quiet areas further from the town, contact staff at Baan Tai Had Resort or one of the nearby homestays.

Eng (In) and Chang (Chan), the “original” Siamese twins, were born in Samut Songkhram in 1811, when Thailand was known as Siam. The boys’ bodies were joined from breastbone to navel by a short fleshy ligament, but they shared no vital organs and eventually managed to stretch their connecting tissue so that they could stand almost side by side instead of permanently facing each other.

In 1824 the boys were spotted by entrepreneurial Scottish trader Robert Hunter, who returned five years later with an American sea merchant, Captain Abel Coffin, to convince the twins’ mother to let them take her sons on a world tour. Hunter and Coffin anticipated a lucrative career as producer-managers of an exotic freak show, and were not disappointed. They launched the twins in Boston, advertising them as “the Monster” and charging the public 50 cents to watch the boys demonstrate how they walked and ran. Though shabbily treated and poorly paid, the twins soon developed a more theatrical show, enthralling their audiences with acrobatics and feats of strength, and earning the soubriquet “the eighth wonder of the world”. At the age of 21, having split from their exploitative managers, the twins became self-employed, but continued to tour with other companies across the world. Wherever they went, they would always be given a thorough examination by local medics, partly to counter accusations of fakery, but also because this was the first time the world and its doctors had been introduced to conjoined twins. Such was the twins’ international celebrity that the term “Siamese twins” has been used ever since. Chang and Eng also sought advice from these doctors on surgical separation – an issue they returned to repeatedly right until their deaths but never acted upon, despite plenty of gruesome suggestions.

By 1840 the twins had become quite wealthy and decided to settle down. They were granted American citizenship, assumed the family name Bunker, and became slave-owning plantation farmers in North Carolina. Three years later they married two local sisters, Addie and Sally Yates, and between them went on to father 21 children. The families lived in separate houses and the twins shuttled between the two, keeping to a strict timetable of three days in each household; for an intriguing imagined account of this bizarre state of affairs, read Darin Strauss’s novel Chang and Eng. Chang and Eng had quite different personalities, and relations between the two couples soured, leading to the division of their assets, with Chang’s family getting most of the land, and Eng’s most of the slaves. To support their dependants, the twins were obliged to take their show back on the road several times, on occasion working with the infamous showman P.T. Barnum. Their final tour was born out of financial desperation following the 1861–65 Civil War, which had wiped out most of the twins’ riches and led to the liberation of all their slaves.

In 1874, Chang succumbed to bronchitis and died; Eng, who might have survived on his own if an operation had been performed immediately, died a few hours later, possibly of shock. They were 62. The twins are buried in White Plains in North Carolina, but there’s a memorial to them near their birthplace in Samut Songkhram, where a statue and the small, makeshift In-Chan Museum  have been erected 4km north of the provincial capital’s centre on Thanon Ekachai.