the first long-distance train ride
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
I’ve always looked with admiration and wonder at those classic shots from trains that other people take….now we are in the position to take our own. Expect more of these!
Train Journey Number 1 on the Ekspres Rakyat from Singapore to Tampin taught us one very important lesson. If a train is due to arrive at 12:20, do not expect to eat lunch at the destination. Because if it doesn’t get in until 2pm, you’ll be very hungry by the time you arrive, and no end of interesting sights will appease the stomach in the final hour (especially if breakfast had just been lime squeezed on papaya at 6 o’clock). What’s more, if the sights amount to more and more palm trees as per the previous four hours, they will have long ago lost their interest factor too. And if they are dangling with coconuts and other tropical delicacies, they will serve only to tantalise and torment!
So next time we take food. We are not at all put off travelling by train. It’s everything we expected – cheap, spacious, relaxing.
Tampin will likely blur in our memories as “the quaint wee hot place we trudged through to get to the bus station”. Ah, the bus. Not express, not first class, slower than a taxi. But it got us to Melaka….and gave us a BUMPING authentic adventure too. When we had disembarked from the train we had watched a line of white faces climb aboard a waiting tour bus as we insisted to a taxi driver that we did not require his services. Envy flashed momentarilly through my mind. Off drove the bus. Off drove the taxi. Then the stationmaster engaged us in conversation that would prove to be most helpful. He commended our decision to avoid the taxi, and suggested we take the bus to KL instead of the train in a few days’ time. We’re flexible, we’ll take his advice. But there we still were, still stuck alone at the train station thinking about the tour group already on its airconditioned-with-suspension-way to Melaka.
Before too long we were headed in the same direction, bags piled on bodies and in the aisle, wind whistling through our hair, drizzle misting in the open windows.
Grandpa turned round and quipped something about the journey, not arriving at the destination being important……while it was great to arrive at that day’s destination, I sure agree that the journey was exciting!
PS Here’s Singapore Train Station…wonderful paintings on the tiles tell its history…
rayres