Japan Stories: November 1999
"What a Funny Trip"
For the second leg of our train journey, we'll get back on the E&O in Kuala Lumpur, and take it all the way to Bangkok, Thailand. This leg promises to be more interesting, because we'll get to spend two nights on the train.
The train is late getting to KL; recent monsoons have flooded portions of the tracks. The train's supposed to pull in around 10:40 pm, but it still hasn't shown up at 11:30. We wait at the station with four other passengers, and we all introduce ourselves. We meet Ian and Jennie Jenkinson from Australia, and a man named Colin from Hong Kong who's traveling with his mother, Rosemarie. By the time we board the train around midnight, the six of us have become friends, and we'll end up sharing meals together for the rest of the trip.
Our car's steward, a very friendly man named Weenus, shows us to our new compartment. This compartment is a little bigger than the last one, with even more room to spread out. The beds are pretty comfortable, although it's hard to get to sleep right away—the shaking of the train produces mysterious rattles throughout the compartment. One of us gets up every few minutes to locate and silence another rattling door, bracket, or window shade. After half an hour of this, the room's finally quiet enough, and we fall asleep.
Early the next morning, the train mysteriously comes to a stop far away from any station. The authoritative and reassuring voice of Chris, the train manager, comes on the public address system. He explains that a freight train has derailed north of us. (There have been no casualties.) Unfortunately, there is only a single train track that goes all the way up the Malaysian peninsula, and it's now blocked. We'll have to wait until the derailed train can be cleared off the track.
The one and only track to Thailand
We're resigned to spending a day on a stationary train, but Chris and the rest of the E&O management turn out to be quite accomplished at making up new plans on the fly. Chris comes back on the P.A. a short while later to announce they've made arrangements for us to head back south for the day to take a city tour of Melacca. This sounds good to us, because Melacca sounded interesting to us, and we hadn’t had a chance to see it.
Chris says the bad news is that when the train resumes going north it’ll be too far behind schedule to get to Bangkok on time. They have to cancel the tours of Georgetown and the River Kwai, which is shame. Once we cross over the Thai border, the train will stop at the town of Hat Yai, where everyone will be forced to disembark and be transferred to a chartered airplane for a boring old flight up to Bangkok. This is all pretty unfortunate, since the point of the trip had been to avoid taking a flight.
The train goes back south to Kuala Lumpur, then stops again. Chris says that the track south of us is now flooded. We can't go south, and we still can't go north because of the derailed train. For the time being, we're completely stuck in KL. Jan is standing in the narrow hallway of our car listening to these announcements with Weenus. Weenus just listens to all this and shakes his head. "What a funny trip", he says. Just another day of train travel in Southeast Asia, we guess.
Chris has one more announcement: since we'll be stuck in KL for the day, they've chartered a tour of the city for everyone. This would be fantastic—if we hadn't just spent half a week in KL ourselves.
Still, we do have fun going around the city again. We see a crafts museum we'd already seen (but this time get to watch batik painting, which is fascinating), a presidential palace (we can't go in, so all we really get to see is a big fence), a war memorial, and Mardeka Square (where Malaysia declared independence from Britain).
A Muslim woman lets Angela try her hand at painting batik on silk
When we get back to the train, Chris has good news: the E&O management has decided that anyone who wants to stay on the train can stay on all the way up to Bangkok. It will arrive in Bangkok a full day later than scheduled. (On this particular voyage, it seems, the E&O has ended up vying to match Amtrak's record for punctuality.) All passengers need to decide if they want to opt for the flight from Hat Yai on the Thai border, or whether they'll stick it out on the train for an extra day. We tell Chris we can't wait to see how things turn out, and that they couldn't drag us away; we'll gladly stay on for the entire trip.