Saturday, 29/09/2012 – 107 A.D.
We first awoke to the sound of a child screaming with delight in the corridor, its parents occasionally speaking, oblivious to there being other guests in the hotel. We estimate this was some time around 07:00. Both Tim and I waited for the other to go out and tell it to shut the hell up. Instead we both went back to our slumbers.
It was the day of our first major train journey in this round the world trip of ours. We had our tickets printed out, we’d planned our travel across the city to the nth degree…so what could go wrong? Surprisingly nothing, as it happened, apart from the rain coming down as we were leaving Marsilling station and about to do our 15 minute walk to Woodlands Checkpoint. That meant the waterproofs came out, with day bags worn frontwise and under them we looked like a couple of pregnant backpackers as we made the punishing walk! Actually, it wasn’t too bad, what with the rain keeping us vaguely cool in the tropical heat.
[Cars leaving Singapore have to have at least more than half a tank of gas to prevent them constantly going to Malaysia for cheaper fuel.]
This is the difference between me and my brother – I poured away my small tub of washing powder, he kept hold of his. I dunno, I guess I just wanted peace of mind. We’re leaving a country where they put drug traffickers to death and the last thing I needed was a customs officer opening my luggage and getting excited by a small quantity of white powder. “But it smells like Persil,” Tim rightly protested. Sure, but that train wasn’t going to wait for me while I went through a full-on body search and got swabbed in all kinds of private places!
[Waiting in line for the immigration process…we missed the sign on the wall prohibiting the taking of photographs! I don’t think you get put to death for that though.]
Getting through customs turned out to be a breeze. All we had to do was put our luggage through a scanner (one obviously designed to ignore Aerial Ultra) and there wasn’t even a body sensor to deal with, which meant we avoided that annoying process of, “Empty your pockets please, ladies and gentlemen!” As we sat waiting for the train, still on Singaporean soil, yet technically under Malaysian jurisdiction, a young child screamed its head off nearby. “I’ll bet they sit behind us!” I remarked and Tim just smiled.
Coach M3 was where our designated seats were. Coach M3 was listed as “superior class”, though given that it’s second class seating, I’m not quite sure what it was supposed to be superior to. Sitting on the roof? Hanging on to the sides? Superior Class turned out to be a bit crappy, but it could have been dirtier. On the whole it was functional enough to get us from A to B (or A to KL) in six hours, providing there were no delays. And sure enough, the family with the screaming young child came to sit in Coach M3. “I bloody told you!” I said to Tim. “Yeah, but they’re not sitting directly behind you, are they?” he replied. No, they weren’t, but five minutes after the train started moving, and with kid still screaming, the whole family got up and came to sit in the seat RIGHT BEHIND US! Why??? The carriage was barely a quarter full with loads of empty seats so why come to make our lives a misery? We had to laugh. Fortunately, just across the water in Malaysia and at the first stop, some people (quiet people) got on and they had reserved the seats directly behind us, so noisy family had to move. Great success!
[“Now we can eat our packed lunches and watch The Mighty Boosh in peace!”]
Oh yeah, and today I managed to actually bring a packed lunch with sandwiches that contained fillings. So much tastier!
A lot of the scenery on the journey was Malaysian jungle, not surprisingly. Occasionally we stopped at stations of small ramshackle towns where children played right beside the tracks and people watched the train pass as if it was the highlight of their rural day. A part of me wished we could get off and explore these truly out-of-the-way places, maybe even spend a few nights there, rather than retreat to the cosmopolitan safety of yet another metropolis. Definitely one to think about for the future.
Our train arrived at Sentral Station in KL bang on time, which was great because the screaming child was once again doing his thing. The station has a great system for taxi’s where you go to the counter and effectively buy your trip in advance. The standard price to get to our hotel on Jalan Pudu Lama was ten ringgits (5 ringgits = 1 pound) and all we had to do was give the driver the ticket we got from the counter, no need to worry about him having a dodgy meter or going twice around the one way system. And he was banging out some great Buddhist tunes on the stereo, which probably soothed his nerves against the manic traffic.
The Mayview Glory Hotel seems okay and our room has a bit more space than the last one, though it has neither a kettle nor a fridge. There is drinking water available on the 1st floor, but Tim is still sceptical and it's rubbing off on me, not that I have the option to boil the tap water now. Our room also has an arrow on the ceiling which points west to Mecca in case we fancy a quick prayer, rather than simply living on one as we have been doing for the past three months.
Not really having much time to plan a meal, we took a quick walk out of the hotel, stepped over a cockroach on the kerbside and headed to the KFC close by. I asked for the Colonel Burger Combo and questioned whether the girl had taken my order correctly when she presented me with a cardboard plate of potato wedges instead of fries. Still, the sauce they were coated in wasn’t bad at all…a sort of cheese-meets-mustard-meets-something-else…and I’m hoping and praying that the “something else” is something that agrees with my belly! After dinner, the only thing left to do that evening was to sit down and make use of the strong internet connection to watch a live stream of Liverpool stuffing Norwich 5-2. The reception guy at the hotel had earlier said that everyone around KL over 40 supports Liverpool because they were great in the 80s. Well guess what, people of KL, after that victory at Carrow Road, LFC are great again!
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