On The Train from Kuala Lampur to Singapore

This Trip inspired us both to post

From Leslie

It might be the early part of the twentieth century.  The train is a throwback with brocade seats and curtains on the window.  I feel like I should be wearing a dark blue liberty of London print dress with a dropped waist and lace around the collar, white gloves, a straw cloche hat and high heel round toe shoes with a strap.  In fact I’m wearing khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt, but still it’s like being a Somerset Maugham novel.  The train rattles along on the six hour plus trip, making long station stops and winding past rubber plantations and banana and palm trees.  There are long stretches where there are no signs of civilization.  Sometimes the train pokes along on its rickety track and sometimes it goes so quickly it seems it will fly off the track and we’ll be lying on our sides in some jungle.  It is easy to imagine being here a century or more ago.

We arrive long after dark.  Immigration and custom proceed at a lackadaisical pace and we’re finally out of the terminal expecting to find ATM’s so we can get some Singapore dollars.  But no ATM’s.  And we learn that instead of the subway terminal being at the train station as we were told it’s a bus ride away and we need money for the bus, of course.  We walk around the neighborhood and find a money changer.  At that point we decide to just take a cab, which turns out to be pretty quick (not much traffic at that time of night) and comfortable and relatively cheap.  The temperature is still in the nineties so we sit beside the hotel pool and drink wine and eat pizza.

From Jim

Kuala Lumpur to Singapore – The Trip’s Half the Fun

Around midday yesterday we queued in the Kuala Lumpur central station for the superexpress train to Singapore.  We bought premium seats that put us in a coach that must have been quite elegant when first placed in service during the Eisenhower years, but experienced a bit of wear in the interim to a point where neither the bathroom (probably part of the original equipment) nor the large flat screen tv (definitely not) were operational.   The five dozen passengers in the coach were served by two conductors, a cleaner (who repeatedly cleaned the aisles with a push carpet cleaner) and a woman who served the snack.  It was a six hour trip with roughly a half dozen stops.  The train moved with such enthusiasm that I sometimes wondered whether we were bound for Singapore or glory.  Suffice to say that had it been equipped with seatbelts, we would have fastened them.

Much of the scenery was a lush jungle and the fact that it is largely a single-track line added to the sense of adventure and isolation.  By the time the efficient Singapore bureaucrats boarded to check our documents before allowing our train to cross the bridge linking the two nations, it was dark and we were thoroughly convinced that the trip was totally worthwhile, presenting us with an old ambience that’s totally disappeared from the hypermodern airports in the region.  But we also wondered how much longer the trip would exist.  Along much of the line, parallel tracks were being laid and in several towns,  large, new ghost stations awaited little more than signage and access to the tracks before being placed in service.  Another victory for the escalators, which our tired bodies generally appreciate.