Kuala Lumpur to Hat Yai

The train from K.L. to Hat Yai departed from Platform A at 9:20pm on the dot. Again the beds had already been made up in our carriage, a second-class one this time, but in fact nicer than the first class one. The beds were arranged  parallel to the corridor, each shielded by a curtain. Once I was settled, I was in a private cocoon. A small private cocoon, but at least one with a window! Despite the aircon, sleep came a bit easier tonight, possibly also because of the length of the journey - a whole thirteen hours.

In the morning, I wake up to sunrise over the limestone karsts of Kedah in northern Malaysia.

Thailand arrives in a hurry. We draw up to a station; one end is Malaysia, the other end is Thailand.

We get off the train with all our luggage, cross back to Malaysia, go through emigration, cross into Thailand, go through immigration, then return to Malaysia to await the return of our train, which is being shortened to three carriages for the onward journey, most passengers having disembarked before the border.

Once over the barbed wire border, Southern Thailand is an odd mix of same-same-but-different. The villages have wooden houses with shutters, like Malaysia, but in the gardens are golden shrines. There are lots of 4WD pickups but outside the huddled houses, the landscape isn't of oil palms or rice padis but of thick bush.

At Hat Yai we skillfully dodge the insistent touts ("Hey gorgeous! You wan Haad Yai ride?") and walk to the hotel where I've bought a room for the night. I know we're leaving at 6pm, but I knew I'd be desperate for a shower by this point, and the only hotels that actually offer rooms by the hour are also the hotels that offer ancient massages. 

I think 'ancient' might be a codename, as the bright airy visible massage parlours only offer plain "MASSAGE!!!" I believe the ancient sort are the ones Malaysian men come for - Hat Yai is popular with them for quick cross-border trips. But my friend and I are the only foreign faces we see during our 7-hour stay here.

Sex tourism isn't the only draw, of course. There is also the Wat Hat Yai Nai - which sounds beautiful in a Thai's mouth, and is also very pretty in real life. The reclining Buddha there is the third largest in the world, apparently.

There were other buildings scattered around the complex, and some beautifully kitsch tiny statues to mirror the enormous one.

Hat Yai is the fourth biggest city in Thailand, though you wouldn't know it to look at it. This lack of visible impressiveness is not entirely its fault - with a population of 150,000 people, it can't compete on any level with Bangkok, which boasts of 5.6 million! I'm a little nervous as we board our onward train...

PS I haven't been making a spelling mistake all the way through this post - Hat Yai is the official modern spelling; Haad Yai is the older usage which is still visible on the train station, and it's actually closer to the way Thais pronounce it.

Johor Bahru to Kuala Lumpur

He was sitting about four rows behind me on the bus from the airport, but when we started moving, he got up and sat in an empty seat across the aisle from me. He stared a little too long so I gathered my bags a little closer. When the bus reached its final destination I followed him forward to ask the driver why, in fact, its final destination was not the train station as advertised. He, the passenger, overheard me and said it was quite nearby, then walked off. I wandered in the general direction he'd waved in until I saw him again. He'd stopped to talk to a shopkeeper; I heard "stesen tren" (which is in fact the street Malay for train station, and not at all me being rude about accents) then he beckoned to me to follow. Still a little wary, it being 9:15pm in a place I didn't know, I trailed him through the streets of Johor Bahru, past Chinese Buddhist cemeteries and Sikh temples and Hindi flower sellers and all the sights, sounds and smells available on a 15-minute walk through this big Southern Malaysian city until he pointed across a busy road and said "train station." Then he turned around and walked back the way we'd come. I stood for a moment just absorbing the sinking sense that comes with having misjudged somebody, then I walked over to the entrance. On the escalator, a man stepped too close. I smiled at him, he smiled back at me. Then he stepped closer and I clutched my bag. Inside the station, I felt him at my back, slowing down when I did, dodging the crowds as I did. I stopped and let him pass, looking up at the signs. Making a quick decision I turned right and as I reached another corner, sensed him at my back again. I stopped and turned, and there he was, right behind me. He smiled and said, "Excuse me, I'm terribly sorry, but are you looking for the Singapore train? Because I'm going to that platform so I can show you if you're lost." In those words.

He was a kind businessman on his way home, helping out the only, clearly lost, orang putih in the station.

My excuse for being such a suspicious foreigner (which is honestly not my normal state when travelling in Asia) is that I'm simply a little overwhelmed by 'civilisation' (and I use that term with great reservation!) There are just so many people and cars and bright, bright lights.

The train from Johor Bahru in the far south of Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur in the centre of the west coast is an old Malaysian one.




My friend and I arrive at our seats to find that I've unknowingly booked us a private coupe... The beds are already made up (it's nearly midnight) and we have a small shower and toilet to ourselves. No window on the top bunk, but then there isn't much need for one as we're due to get into K.L. around sunrise. I almost immediately lie down to sleep, but I obviously haven't counted on the evil masterminds who control the trains, and who immediately turn on the aircon at its lowest setting, leaving me to shiver all night under my thin blanket. Which is okay, because I'm awake anyway from the loud clunking and clanking as the train stops, starts, stops. We arrive in Kuala Lumpur a little late, at 7:15am, black-baggy-eyes announcing our travellerhood.

The Great Railway Bazaar (sort of...)

Trains have always held a fascination for me. Honestly, who would fly when there's a train available? You arrive at the station ten minutes before departure, the stations are usually in the centre of cities, you can take as much luggage as you can carry, and you can get up and walk to a dining car. Plus, if you happen to have a bottle of water on you when you pass through customs, you don't get treated as if you were about to blow up Air Force One. Reading Paul Theroux's books about travelling from London to Japan by train in the 1970s and 2000s made me wish I'd been born a few decades earlier so I could have taken a train through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, and drunk tea from samovars on a Turkish Orient Express.

So I'm doing the next best thing, and travelling one section of his journey - from Singapore at the far south of the Asian peninsula, to the Thai/Laos border where the trains stop. It will involve 8 trains altogether, plus one flight within Laos, covering about 2,150km through four countries on trains with names like Song of the Night, Jungle Line, and the Silk Express.

Seriously. Is it possible to get more steam-age-romantic than sleeper trains through the Orient? ;)

I Do

I was lucky to be invited to a wedding recently. Well, I say lucky - actually I was one of about 300 names on the guestlist, alongside the canteen lady, the gardener, and that odd man that lives three villages down the road. Such is a Sabahan wedding, at least in the village: everyone is invited to celebrate with the family. When I tried to explain to the teacher inviting me that at the last wedding I attended, we had 120 spaces and that was it, she simply couldn't understand. "Not everybody could come?" "Well, no, we only had a few spaces at the tables." "But why didn't you just let people sit outside?" "Well, we didn't have enough food for extra people." Long silence. "You didn't make enough food?" And I can see the horror in her eyes.

Anyway. I felt very privileged to be invited. It was a Catholic wedding, so the first part was in the town church. We got hurried up to the front at the end to take a place in the photos, which felt a bit odd. I can just imagine the conversations twenty years down the line, when Mum brings out her wedding photos and her teenagers ask her who the orang putihs in the photo are. She'll be stumped, as we actually never met her - not before, and not during the wedding - she was far too busy to be paying attention to who was in attendance! (I was invited by her mother, who teaches at one of my schools). 

After the church wedding, we all drove out to the village where the bride's mother's house had been transformed, ready to welcome the hundreds of guests with plenty of makan-makan. The entrance area had a pre-prepared photo of the happy couple and a guestbook and some happy Pooh bears and some flowers and two thrones and some more flowers and... 

We were sad we couldn't stay too long - we watched the couple arrive, greeted with traditional gongs, and then we ate with everybody - we almost got away with sitting in the rows of chairs at the back, but my lovely friend Madiah (mother of the bride) saw the two of us, and immediately bumped us up to the secondary tables. 

So we got to eat some great Dusun food in style :)

In the olden days...

The new curriculum in Sabah is trying to push a more learner-centred way of teaching. Part of this is that exams shouldn't be given anymore - a welcome change, as last year I saw more than enough tiny 6-year-olds sitting at a desk for 1.5 hours writing an exam they couldn't understand. I've been trying to push this idea with my teachers, and generally they're keen to do more ongoing assessment, but they have lots of other stakeholders to convince too - headteachers, heads of departments, non-English teachers, parents, the district office... There are a lot of people whose minds and hearts need changing! (The general attitude amongst those in power is, "This is the way I learnt, what's wrong with it?")

So this year I set up a few workshops on assessment for my mentees. 

Last week was assessment week for all the schools. Assuming that Years 1 and 2 would be having regular lessons while the older kids (under the old curriculum) sat exams, I turned up to schools as usual.

The little kids were sitting exams.

My approach of discussing the issue with my mentee and then suggesting they follow through with other non-English teachers had failed, so in the end, I set up discussion groups at each school with all the new curriculum teachers, and tried to make amends. Hopefully this will be fruitful when we get to the end-of-year exam time!

All this examination meant a lot of invigilating. And so it was at one school I found myself with no available teachers, but a very chatty headteacher. He's a lovely man, and I found myself completely absorbed by his story for nearly two hours. (And by the way, for those entire two hours, during which I barely got a word in, he constantly apologised for his lack of English...) One reason his English was reasonably good was that he was in almost the last batch of Malaysian children to attend school in English. His headmaster was Malaysian, but every single teacher was foreign, and his mother tongue was banned in school. He tells me that he managed to get through six years of high school without speaking a word - he was afraid to speak English and wasn't allowed to speak Malay - and passed his exams by studying every night in Malay!

But what I found really interesting was his story of his first few years as a teacher.

He was placed first in a rural school in Ranau district. This school was rural. And when I mean rural, I don't mean my own experience of rural Malinsau, but rural. He had to catch a minibus an hour from Ranau. It dropped him off by the side of the road, and then from there he walked to the school. "The children they stay at night because very far from their homes. Sixteen hours!" 

"Sixteen hours walking?" I said. "You walked for sixteen hours to get to school?"

"Oh no," he said, smiling, "I didn't walk for sixteen hours, that was the children and the parents. No, no, I only had to walk for nine hours to get there."

I just sat in silence. This man used to walk nine hours to school. And by walk, mind you, he doesn't mean a gentle stroll down a wooded path - he means nine hours through wet, muddy, dangerous, hilly rainforest. In the days before serious deforestation.

I finally asked, "So did all the teachers make this journey every weekend?"

"Oh no, once I was out there I stayed for the whole term and only came back to town in the long holiday. Oh, and also, I was the only teacher there. The headmaster met me on the first day, then he went back to town for the rest of the year, and there was nobody else."

I asked how many children he was teaching, all on his own, out in the rainforest, on his very first job out of college.

"Not too many. I had only 16 children from Year 1 to Year 6. I taught one class, then gave them work, then I went to teach another class..."

And so on.

People are pretty remarkable sometimes... 

Birthday Celebrations

Last weekend, Ranau played host to Sabah's Wesak celebration. This was quite an honour, as it hasn't been celebrated in Sabah since the 1980s; the precise date and place was determined by Chinese astrologers (in combination, says the cynical side of me, with the commercial need to have it on a weekend in a large town...) and Ranau came out best. The Chinese Buddhist temple has been undergoing a thorough spring cleaning over the past month or so, and on Saturday night it looked radiant. Temples in Sabah pale in comparison with the richly painted Korean temples, and are mere toddlers in the scheme of things - I believe this one dates back a few decades, while some of the Korean ones I visited were centuries old. But Ranau's temple has some beautiful paintings inside, and on the outside some impressive statues, and it's kept spotlessly bright and cheerful by volunteers. And I like the way that it stands at the top of a very short street that also accommodates an Anglican church and the town mosque. We watched the parade standing across the road from the mosque, and were thus constantly reminded of the balance between the national religion and others.

So. Wesak Day. Wesak Day is also known as Buddha's Birthday, and it's generally a public holiday across most of Asia, time for Buddhists to meditate on his teachings and life.

In Ranau it was time for a great big assault on the senses - incense, drums, shouting, whistles, bright neon lights all had their parts to play. The Lion Dance made another appearance too; they leapt and growled and shook at the front of each section of the procession.

In the heat of the late afternoon, the dancers took it in turns. When not dancing, they took over as musicians, still dressed in the lions' legs. The pink pom-poms on toes were particularly appealing.

The noise was astounding - Fiona and I had to shout to each other to be heard sometimes over the drums and tambourines and whistles. 

The parade began at sunset with various groups from across Sabah walking down the hill. A lot of them were elderly Chinese men with huge banners proclaiming their origins, who laughed and pointed at us and called out "Welcome to Malaysia!" Other groups were young, wearing Buddha costumes and carrying flags on bamboo poles.

The flags, intricately embroidered with dragons and flowers, were entirely in the lucky colours of reds and oranges, and they absorbed and enhanced the colours of the setting sun. 

As the darkness settled, the celebrations became more intense and religious. There were men walking down the street, seemingly in the grip of seizures, each one surrounded by three more men, holding their arms out, confining the babbling, gesticulating man. This was a more Malaysian version of Buddha's Birthday, and not one I saw in Korea. The central man calls down the spirits, the gods, into his body. They thrash around, using his bamboo whip to lash out at human beings. The three guards are preventing the gods from escaping and wreaking havoc on the town. The procession makes a full circle through the town to keep the balance and to symbolically close the loop of protection that is created by allowing the gods to have their way for a few short hours.

Some groups bore wooden boxes in the shape of temples, lit up in chains of neon lights. The boxes were rocking wildly; the young Buddha was inside, playing, and messing with his carriers. 

Sometimes he made his carriers shoot off out of the procession, careering madly around the roundabout, handily situated at the bottom of the street.

After the procession had made its way around town, we walked up to the temple and sat for a while at the courtyard fountain. Although this was a strictly Chinese Buddhist celebration, there were all sorts of onlookers - kids still in school uniform, elderly women in Malay sarongs, Catholic nuns, and most of Fiona and my students and teachers - walking from A to B took a looooong time as we stopped to chat and say hello.

Inside the temple, men and women lit joss sticks and carried them to pictures of different deities to pray before.

The next day when I drove down the mountain to K.K., I drove the whole way behind a procession of cars billowing silk from the windows and carrying piles of red wooden boxes and bamboo sticks in the back seats.

Cycling? Bah!

Last Monday, I was driving home from school; this was a village school, past Lohan Village. There's one road in and out for the whole area, in which several hundred people live. There are some facilities - a couple of small shops, a few schools, two marketplaces - but for anything else, people drive to Ranau, about 20 minutes away, on the afore-mentioned one road.

So. One road in and out. Several hundred people, several hundred cars. Got it?

The road was closed.

As I came up to the junction with the main Kota Kinabalu-Sandakan road, I slowed to a halt behind about twenty other cars. I couldn't see any obstruction, but I patiently waited to see if we would move. I point out my patience, because I was the only one - everyone else seemed determined to be further forward than everyone else; of course, there's a fundamental flaw in this plan, and what actually happened was that eventually there was no more space between cars, and overtaking cars ended up stalled on the wrong side of the road. After about twenty minutes, I got out and started walking towards the junction. I saw two of my Guru Besars (literally big teacher, or headteachers) talking to each other and stopped to ask if they knew the problem. They did. The road was closed because the first ever Tour of Borneo, a cycling race mimicking the Tour de France, was today coming through Ranau. Apparently it was a surprise for everybody, including the police, who stood around at the junction guarding their yellow tape barrier shrugging their shoulders at angry drivers.

This was at 1:30pm.

At 3pm, we were still standing around.

At 3:30pm, some of us were allowed to drive down the empty road to a supermarket 100m away so that we could buy drinks or food. I stood with some friendly policemen-and-women.

We talked about race, religion, marital status, and age, plus a couple of other banned topics. Just a normal conversation in Malaysia, then. Occasionally we were passed by elderly men and women, traditional cloths wound around their heads and basketry on their backs. I wondered what they made of the wailing support vehicles and empty roads. By the looks on their faces, and their dogged walking, they generally didn't care very much.

At 4pm, the cyclists finally came through. Basically, the road had been closed for 3 hours, so that a hundred cyclists could spend twenty seconds riding down a completely empty road. And I do mean twenty seconds - those guys are fast. The ones towards the back were a little slower - they had after all ridden all the way from Sandakan, up the side of a mountain range - and I nearly caused an accident as one looked up and spotted what was probably the only orang putih he'd seen since Sandakan, swerving towards me. It caused a few chuckles among my policemen friends.

Finally, after four hours of shutting down Sabah's main road, we were allowed to get moving again. The following day being Worker's Day, of course, everybody was travelling somewhere, and so all the hundreds of cars that had been waiting at junctions and in supermarket carparks across the state suddenly flooded the road. My friendly policemen just up and left, with no intention of directing traffic. My usual two hour drive to KK turned into a three hour one, and as I passed some knackered looking cyclists sitting down to dinner in Kundasang, at a cafe overlooking the snarled-up traffic, I felt like shaking my fist and shouting "You did this! You!"

One good thing to come out of the day (apart from cheering on the cyclists with a bunch of bemused villagers, who'd never seen lycra before) was that on my foray into the supermarket I discovered these cleverly marketed crisps.

Really?

(PS. I do actually like cyclists, promise.)