Travelogue 2023/3 The Jungle Railway (Malaysia) and Pattani Sultanate (Thailand), by train

The Jungle Train

The main railway from Singapore to Bangkok runs along the west coast of Malaysia. But there is a branch that takes a more central and eastern route. It branches off at Gemas and rejoins the main line in Hat Yai (in the south of Thailand). At the time of construction, this was still largely jungle, hence the nickname. The center and east is still the less developed and more conservative part of the Malaysian Peninsula.

Gemas

Gemas is a small provincial town with three x three blocks of shops. Cars drive around all the time, hardly anyone walks here. Yet there was a decent hotel and a vegetarian restaurant - only open for lunch, but they were willing to cook something for us. We saw the most extraordinary phenomena when we took an evening stroll: thousands and thousands of swallows had perched on every telephone and electricity cable that hung over the road, and also on many edges of facades. Always at exactly 15 cm distance from each other. In the twilight you saw all those little black balls with a white belly sitting next to each other. Fascinating.

The first stage was to Kuala Lipis, about 275 km in 5 hours. This railway line was recently refurbished, and new a/c trains were running. Still diesel, still single track.

With about 60 km/h we drove through a green world. Many rubber and palm oil plantations, some neglected. In between were plots where nature immediately blossomed. Streams with swirling brown water, and pieces of flooded land. The rainy season had just ended. ...nearly endless palm plantations... Sometimes on both sides so close to the track that the branches touched the train. It seemed as if you were actually inside the plantation, as if you were walking under the palm trees.

Kuala Lipis

Kuala Lipis once was a gold mining town. And the old center still has a wild-west feel. The British made it the capital of the state/sultanate around 1900. When the railway line came to town in 1922, development took a leap and a handful of colonial buildings were built: railway station, British residence and state mosque. And a row of stone houses in the main street between the station and the river - in your mind's eye you can still see the cowboys and covered wagons driving through.

After independence, the capital moved to the coast and Kuala Lipis became less important. Urban expansions look very unplanned: separate areas where a mall and houses are built, at a considerable distance from each other.

We walked around a bit. Along some roads lay a narrow strip of jungle. One step into the jungle and it is dark, uneven, the soil full of smelly decomposing organic material, and the noise of a thousand of insects. Two steps into the jungle and you risk getting lost.

The second stage was to Gua Musang, about 75 km in 2 hours.

Still plantations along the way, but more and more wild green in between.

In the last stretch, straight karst mountains appeared in the landscape, with bare steep rocky sides, sometimes sloping slightly forward, bushes and trees in cracks and on top.

Gua Musang

Gua Musang has almost the same layout as Kuala Lipis. Three old streets between the station and the river, and new neighborhoods at a considerable distance from each other, all geared towards car traffic. Only the colonial buildings are missing. Instead you have the karst mountains that rise vertically, a dominant one right behind the station.

On the platform of the old train station we turned right, heading south. At the end of the platform, we went down the stairs and crossed the railway. A path led into a very small kampong of shabby wooden houses. It almost seemed deserted, but there were some children milling around, watching us shyly. We followed the path between the houses, also in a southerly direction. We crossed a stream via a narrow concrete dam. Shortly after that we turned left and crossed the stream again via a slightly larger concrete dam. I thought it was too narrow, until I found a stick to keep my balance. Now we were just 10 meters from the rock wall, with a jagged edge of jungle in front of it. There was a sort of path leading up between the gigantic trees. With the help of ropes you could go further up. Immediately surrounded by huge leaves and fallen branches. There was a ladder that you could climb to go into a cave. But we didn't. This was already a beautiful piece of jungle walk, however small and short.

⇒ If you want to make this walk, make sure to assess the risks.

Early in the morning for the third leg of the Jungle Railway, we boarded the night train that had left the Malaysian-Singapore border the night before. This was an older train that wobbled and rattled more. We wanted to have breakfast in the dining car, but the toast had already run out. It was still too early for fried rice, moreover it was not vegetarian. So we enjoyed the view with a cup of coffee. The landscape with the rising sun and rising morning mist was beautiful.

We rode out of the mountains and into the flat delta. Suddenly we were riding between green rice fields. After 5 hours and 200 km we reached Kota Bharu, a big city. Heart of the conservative Islamic northeast. You saw many facades inspired by Arabic motifs. Malay, Chinese and Arabic were the most commonly used languages ​​on facades and signposts, while English and Tamil had receded into the background.

It took a day for the city to unveil its charms to us. There were still pieces of old kampong between ugly high-rise buildings. Some houses were old and dilapidated, others still looked well maintained. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful. A few houses must have been villas in their day: large, beautifully designed, with hexagonal extensions and verandas. Now sadly somewhat neglected. They would just be salvageable if someone would pay attention to them now. But a little further on their fate had already been announced: new houses.

Pattani, in the deep south of Thailand

From Kota Bharu we entered Thailand. Trains no longer run on this stretch of railway line, so we had to take the bus for an hour. The border was a classic: first the formalities to leave Malaysia. Then walk through no man's land  across the border river, parallel to the unused railway bridge. Then get the forms and stamps to enter Thailand.

In Sungai Kolok we got back on the train, to Yala (120 km in 2 hours).

⇒ If you want to take this train, make sure to assess the risks.

For centuries, Pattani was one of the Malay sultanates. Its heyday was in the 16th century. In the 18th century it was conquered by Thailand. For a long time it remained Thai in name but actually independent. At the beginning of the 20th century it was divided by England and Thailand into a Thai and a Malay part. On the west side, Thailand also gained Satun, and it gave up its claims on other sultanates - which became part of British-occupied territory and later Malaysia. This was a treaty between England and Thailand, the Malaysian sultanates who were involved had nothing to say.

Thailand introduced Thaiification programs in the part allocated to them, which did not go down well and resistance movements arose that wanted autonomy, especially in the former Pattani. At the beginning of the 21st century, they were taken over by ISIS-like groups that want to establish an Islamic Caliphate, have become more violent and aim for chaos and lawlessness, in which their criminal activities flourish. They are now also turning against the local population because they consider them not strict enough in their observance of islam. Police officers and posts, Buddhist monks and monasteries, teachers and schools, and trains and railway lines are particularly targeted by attacks.

Despite that, daily life is generally quiet. It is a pity that the official travel advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is "red", which only further isolates the area. Red here cannot be compared to the red for Syria or Afghanistan, for example. As an outsider, only the heavily armed soldiers who travel on the train stand out. (*)

We had been following the local news closely for a while. Currently, it seemed relatively quiet and safe for foreigners to travel through Pattani. We made two train journeys with a stopover in Yala.

 

Yala

Yala is a vast, quiet, green city. There is a large district with all provincial institutions, built in circles around the city pillar. The roads are quiet and wide and lined with trees. The spacious layout means you have to walk quite a distance to get around.

The city pillar is located in a temple in the middle of a round park with fish ponds. Feeding fish is popular, and the fish will swim towards you as soon as you stop on the bank. Hundreds of mouths snap above the water. The rear fish push so hard that the front ones are lifted above the surface.

Bells hang from the temple and tinkle softly in the wind. Inside, a few people are doing puja. Pieces of gold leaf flutter from the statue of a monk.

Everything looks peaceful and quiet. Muslims also feed the fish, even though it is a Buddhist tradition. And from under a headscarf the big, warm Thai smile radiates just as bright.

From Yala we took the train to Hat Yai (another 120 km in 2 hours), where the eastern branch rejoins the main line from Singapore to Bangkok.

More 

(*) 6 weeks later the Dutch government changes the travel advice from “red” to “orange”. But throughout 2023 there were still quit a number of attacks and bombings on police posts and the like. 

How the journey began: Amsterdam-Dubai-Mangalore-Kuala Lumpur by lowcost carrier and narrow-body

How the journey continued: Satun (TH) - Kuala Lumpur (MY)

Practical tips to make this trip: Lily's Mini Travel Guide

Travelogue 2018/2, Negotiating North Sumatra (Indonesia)

From Doha we travelled via Kuala Lumpur to Medan. A rollercoaster of cultures, levels of development, climates, time zones and day-and-night rhythm.  Sumatra is roughly the size of Spain and has a similar number of inhabitants, but its infrastructure is way less developed. So we designed a non-ambitious tour of the province of North Sumatra.

Medan city

At first sight Medan is large, busy, dirty and noisy. At second sight too, but then you also see the relaxed and cheerful people, always willing to give you a big smile and have a chat. Nobody gets upset, everybody is helpful. There are nice vegan eateries and trendy coffee shops. The mood is pleasant, and if the noise and air pollution wouldn’t chase you away, you’d happily stay for a while.

One could measure the degree of development of a country by the number of meters one can walk on the pavement. In Medan the sidewalks are usually blocked by shop fronts, parked cars or motorcycles, or heaps of building materials, mud or dug up sewage sludge. There are holes big enough to fall into the sewer, unexpected steps, loose slabs or ends of reinforcing steel sticking out.

So mostly you walk on the street, between parked cars and the traffic, hoping the drivers will see you. Traffic mainly consists of relatively new cars, motorbikes and becaks – bikes with a side car that you rent for a ride.

One morning after looking at old colonial buildings and Little India, we took a becak home. It was the oldest and most ramshackle one of Medan. The engine stalled all the time, the front wheel wasn’t in line, petrol came via a tube from a jerry can hanging on the steering wheel. When the driver lit a cigarette he held it in his hand right next to the jerry can. We drove slower than the flow of traffic, which was a real problem as weaving in and out of lanes is crucial for negotiation traffic here. Because of the one way system we had to make quite a detour. All in all we took half an hour inhaling exhumes for what would have been a 2½km walk. Still, we survived. And most drivers were relaxed, gave each other room to move, hardly used the horn and didn’t dive into non-existing spaces.

Bukit Lawang jungle

Usually I don’t feel at home in places that are purely touristic. Bukit Lawang is such a place. It’s a village on the edge of a National Park where an orang utan rehabilitation center used to be. The feeding platform used to be a great spot to watch the mighty animals. The platform is closed now and the only way to see the semi wild orang utans that stuck around is on a long, overpriced jungle trekking – and that is what all the tourists do here.

(Here is the story of my 2000 jungle trek)

Bukit Lawang survived thanks to the treks, the river, the fresh air and as a backpacker hangout. We stayed a couple of days in the strip along the river, in the one guesthouse / restaurant that was busy, cozy and had good food.

Then we moved upstream for a couple of days to a rather remote guesthouse, 1km over a small footpath. There we found the real jungle feel. The place was well designed and decorated with lots of wood and bamboo, the Australian-Indonesian couple that ran it made you feel relaxed.

The raging river,  the green wall of jungle on the opposite shore, the monkeys and the butterflies, one more cup of coffee on the veranda – I could get used to that.  Dinner with our hosts in the evening, total darkness at night, the sounds of monkeys and crickets in the morning. After a rain shower water vapor would slowly rise from the forest and form clouds.

Berastagi volcanos

Berastagi is a former Dutch hill station at 1400m. Now it’s an agricultural town, the center of growing non-tropical vegetables. The wholesale market where the farmers bring their produce was a fascinating chaos where huge quantities of carrots, cabbages and potatoes where hauled around in old trucks that got stuck in the mud.

In the weekend Medan people come to escape the city. The dozen western tourists vanish in the crowd. There are two active volcanos nearby, one of which can easily be climbed – and that is what all the tourists do here. We went straight to the hot springs at the end of the descent to soak up the sulphur.

A trip to the foot of the other, even more active volcano was canceled due to the weather. There were daily eruptions, but they lasted just 5 minutes, so you had to be lucky to see one. After one such eruption the mountain had totally hidden itself behind its own cloud of ash. When it started raining a thin layer of volcanic ash covered everything, including our roof terrace.

Just like the rain forest, volcanos create their own clouds. Steam rising from the cracks in the rocks rise and form a cloud that will stick to the top of the mountain.

The weather. The monsoon lasts long this year, it’s cooler than usual with just 23-26 degrees and mostly overcast. Sometimes the sun sort of breaks through, and most rain is at night.

Lake Toba

Travelling in Sumatra isn’t harder than in say India, but over there I know my way around things better. A night in a lousy hotel, a sick day, serious harassment at a bus station, a meal that doesn’t go down well, a credit card that gets rejected – it can be tough and exhausting at times.

All the more pleasant that we could relax at the shores of Lake Toba – and that is what all the tourists do here.

We stayed there for a week and it was the first place on Sumatra where we really felt at home. The mood was relaxed, nature was beautiful. Even though it is rather touristy, there’s enough couleure locale in the small shops and cafes. And it just takes a couple of steps off main street to be among rice paddies and water buffaloes.

The Rohingya: A people hidden in the jungle

Visiting the Thai-Malaysian border

This was real jungle with lots of trees that sprouted up to 50 meters straight up to catch a little light where their crown expanded. Thick lianas and parasitic plants growing around it. Withered leaves of half a meter mixed with bright red leaves covered the ground.

The trail was held in place by shallow roots, except for a stretch that was washed down, where we had to climb. There the vines and roots came in handy to hold on to. Traces of wild boar, thorny rattan, large butterflies, loud high-pitched chirping of insects - the forest was full of them.

We walked along a path through the Thale Ban National Park in the far southwestern corner of Thailand. According to the sign this was an evermoist forest, almost but not quite as impenetrable as the tropical rain forest that we had seen further south in Malaysia. This was an inhospitable area of swamps, mountains and jungle. That's why we had crossed the border with a cargo boat on the Andaman Sea.

But now we were near the only land border in the region, a small road with little traffic and certainly no public transport. The last 20 kilometres we had hitch-hiked with a border guard in uniform, in a big pick-up truck on his way to work. The National Park was two kilometres from the border with nothing but jungle between.

It was shocking, but not unimaginable, when we read in the newspaper a few months later that exactly here they discovered secret refugee camps where Rohingyas had been detained, extorted by traffickers and left for dead.

The boat people, refugees

Thailand and Myanmar share a long border, and some 150.000 Karen have been stuck for 30 years in refugee camps just across the border in Thailand, 1500 kilometres to the north. They are now a major destination for cultural visits and volunteer work by Western tourists. In contrast the Rohingya from western Myanmar are virtually unknown. They are not accepted because their religion is different from the majority, the Buddhists. They cannot flee over the border with Thailand through the jungle, but need to sail across the Andaman Sea. Their goal is Malaysia, where Muslims are the majority. But often their boats land in southern Thailand, where on their way to Malaysia they fall into the hands of human traffickers.

At open sea, their boats were chased or towed away by the Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian coast guard. In May 2015 the case received so much international attention that Malaysia decided to allow them in temporarily.

Visiting Rakhine state

We were especially touched by this case since seven years ago we were in Rakhine, the Myanmar region where the Rohingya come from. For a short time the area was accessible when Myanmar was just beginning to be more open and the regime sought rapprochement with the opposition and the world. But soon a new domestic conflict was sought and found in this minority. Although they have lived in Rakhine for many generations or centuries, partly descendants of Persian and Arab traders, partly migrants within what was one British colony in the 19th century, they are now seen as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Looking back, it is astonishing that at that time we did not recognize the region as Islamic. Apparently they already had to keep a low profile. The streets of Sittwe were dominated by monks, nuns and temples. The scarce tourist did not bring prosperity to Mrauk U, which was clearly a dead poor corner of the country. Cell phones had no cover in Sittwe, Mrauk U did not even have a land line with the rest of the world.

Mrauk U was an ancient capital of a 16th century empire that stretched over parts of present Bangladesh (whose proximity was illustrated by imported cookies in the store) and the current Rakhine State. There were a lot of temples and pagodas of that time left, located half way between the village and the fields, sometimes dilapidated and overgrown. Again and again you'd see another temple on a hill or around the corner. The setting alone was stunning, but the chedis themselves were also beautiful.

We walked around, occasionally accompanied by groups of children who should have been at school. Further away from the village there were no more children shouting "bye bye" or calling after you, but vast fields and women who walked with baskets on their heads. There wasn't a meter of paved street, not a wall of stone. All was wood and bamboo and dirt yards.

A bizarre circle

This last paragraph of my 2008 travel diary, and the paragraph from my 2015 travel diary this piece started with, join a bizarre circle around two places that we visited in ignorance, and then briefly made the world news. Only to be forgotten again.

Amsterdam, May-July 2015, June 2016

Lost in the jungle of Sumatra

Lately there has been a boom of news and TV programs about people getting lost in the jungle, dying, or just barely surviving.  That made ​​me think back to one of the most perilous experiences I've had myself.  I am blessed with a decent sense of direction, but getting lost in the jungle can happen more easily than you think.

November 2000. We had planned to cross Sumatra from south to north. I had travelled a lot in Asia, but I had never been in such a vast and sparsely populated area. Besides long-distance night buses (which I avoided) there was hardly any public transport. And if there was, it was slow and unreliable. In one town we waited three mornings in a row along the side of the road before a van actually left. And three times we got off a bus at dusk, well before our destination, in order to find a hotel by daylight.

Sparsely populated it was.

So we progressed with difficulty and slower than planned and were spending more time on the go, than enjoying the beautiful places. But in the town of Sungai Panui (Sungai Penuh) in the Kerinci valley we allowed ourselves a break for a couple of days.

View from the valley to the hills

Around the Kerinci valley was the Kerinci National Park, an area of hundreds of kilometers. A walk in the jungle would be great, but we did not do irresponsible things, so first we went to inquire at the NP headquarters. Where could you take a nice walk, and what about transportation to the starting point and a guide? A group of rangers explained the different possibilities. The area where we had driven through on the bus from Tapan, appealed to us. One of the rangers said he had a car to drive there and was willing to be our guide. For him it probably was a little extra on the side.

He went home to get a car, his brother's blue mini pickup truck, that had no first gear and hardly any brakes.
We parked 15km away, at a small eatery along the way. At 10 o'clock we went out, first ten minutes on the road, and then onto a path. The path soon became worse, and the forest thicker. There were so many branches, ferns and thorny bushes on the path that I had to walk with my head bent down, sometimes it was almost crawling. It seemed a kind of tunnel between / among dense fern bushes. Being the tallest of the three I suffered most, and it took away the pleasure in the walk and the surroundings.

After an hour we had a discussion: to return or to find better trails? I didn't want to be a spoilsport and stop too soon, so we tried to make clear to our guide that he should find us better paths; he seemed to understand.

But after another 30 minutes, he seemed less and less sure of himself, retracing his steps regularly. We made it ​​clear that now we really wanted to get back to the main road. Yes, follow me, this way, he gestured. We asked explicitly whether he knew where the road was, he said we must trust in Allah. That is when I lost faith in him. Where we walked couldn't be called a path. All the time we had to push our way through the creepers, brambles and undergrowth.  When I saw on my compass that we constantly changed directions and were just zigzagging, I began to worry. I knew he did not know the way back, but I had not paid attention myself how we had walked. Normally I would always know the same way back, but not now. After all, we had an official ranger of the park management organization with us. Can you do better?

Not knowing what else to do, we followed our guide again. He pointed to a hill top, and said over there he would certainly be able to see the road. Meanwhile, this was absolutely not a path, it was a battle with the vegetation that was giving us bleeding scratches and torn clothes. It was really scary when we ended up on top of a layer of ferns covering the underbrush, meters above the ground. Every now and then a branch would break or you'd stumble, and drop down a meter. The idea to break or even just sprain your ankle was terrifying.

Our guide admitted that he was familiar with another part of the forest, but in fact had never been in this area. If only we had known sooner! He talked about sleeping in the woods, hoping that they would come looking for us tomorrow.  But who would actually miss us and who knew in what area we had gone for this walk? And how much of an operation would a possible search be? By now I was really worried how this would end.

After a tough journey of about three quarters of an hour that covered about 100 meters, we were on the hilltop where the guide had put his hopes on. In vain. We saw the rain arrive over the next ridge.

Kerinci National Park

Now it was clear that our guide had no clue, it was time to take matters into our own hands. And our guide was grateful for that. In the sand we drew the mountainside west of the valley. If we would walk steadily to the east, we had to encounter something somewhere. Weak point of the plan was that it could be 10 or 20 km, and we might cover just 250m per hour through the bush. That could take 4 to 8 days. Four days we should be able to keep going without food, shouldn't we? I chose the direction, south east, because I thought the road had to be south of us. In any case, it seemed a straight line had to be better than running around in circles. However hard it was it by now, we took turns cheering each other up.

After a while, again we were standing in front of fern forest that we would have to cross high in the canopy. A horrible prospect. We heard water and planned to follow it downstream - that had to lead somewhere, didn't it?. The descent was very dangerous, the lower we got the muddier and more slippery it got. So either you slid down or you were sucked into the mud. After about 20 minutes we arrived at the river, a narrow, fast-flowing stream, and I was happy to wash the blood off my face. But the vegetation was so dense that it would be impossible to follow. Moreover, it ran to the north, intuitively the wrong direction.

There was no other choice than to climb back up the slope. Clinging from one trunk to the other. After roughly an hour we were back at the place where we had come up with the river plan.  So we had to switch back to the original plan: the straightest possible line to the south east. Our guide had long ago switched to "follow" mode. Personally, I felt already better to at least have a plan, and not aimlessly drift after him. When we rested on a soft heap of fern leaves, and forgot that it was going to rain soon, it felt we could hold on for a while.

In the meantime I was pretty exhausted. We were, after all, fighting through scrub and up and down steep slopes. Lianas grabbed you all the time: sometimes around your feet so you stumbled, sometimes around your body so you had to pull them apart to detach yourself.

The guide searched for broken twigs, so sometimes we walked on a relatively passable animal track (but always lost it again) while I was overseeing the predominant direction to remain south, as far as the terrain allowed. Actually we had developed a good division of labor.

At one point I saw a beautiful single mushroom in the grass, which I was certain to have seen before. If that was true there would soon be a thorny tree trunk on the right, on a place where we were still on some sort of path, many hours ago. Indeed came the spiked stem, and although the guide had already passed it, I called him back and insisted to turn left, to go south. Suddenly it looked as if we were going to come home today! What a relief!  Almost immediately the long-awaited rainstorm erupted. Had that come before I thought that we would get out, I don't think I had managed to keep up my spirits.

Thorny tree trunk

Soon we recognized the tunnelled path that had been so uncomfortable, but where we were not yet lost. We even found the sunscreen I had lost that morning when my backpack was stuck in the branches. Drenched, and sometimes half crawling and always slipping on wet branches and leaves, even our guide was cheerful. When we finally got back to the road he kissed the tarmac.
Back to the diner, I took off my clothes and hung my shirt to dry by the fire while we drank a cup of hot coffee.

Our guide took us back to town. We insisted to go by the now almost deserted office. Although we knew not to expect western standards, we were outraged by the irresponsible and dangerous situation in which the guide had put us, so we wanted to complain to the NP office. If only to prevent future recurrence. To what extent we succeeded in was doubtful, but the message that we were very unhappy came about.

Like vagabonds we walked through town back to the hotel. Dirty, wet, wounded and in torn clothes. The hotel staff came running with thermos of hot water to our room! The scratches on face, arms and legs remained painful for days.

Really, you do not need to do very strange or very stupid things to get lost in the jungle. The vastness and desolation is easy to underestimate.

* November 2000 - August 2001 - April/June 2016 *