The Jungle Train to Jerantut

Every now and then, it's important for a traveller to remind himself that he's in a foreign country.

This is more necessary than may be outwardly apparent; a trip abroad can very easily become one big opportunity to socialize with the western world. Travellers, particularly those who carry a backpack, go to see all the same sights and stay in the same places. English is the chosen lingua franca and one rarely has to step outside of it to be understood.

Locals, too, stay in the background. They bring a plate of food, accept a thank you in their words and mumble a return you're welcome, turn and walk away. They sit in the front, drive the bus and rarely do more than point or gesture in answer to a question.

They're also terminally self-effacing about language: their English is always "bad" or "not very good". Mostly, locals in South East Asia don't talk to foreigners.

And why should they? There's often a large group of us and we have a good grasp of English. We're intimidating.

So meeting locals, or at least seeing what they see, is a challenge and an opportunity not to pass up on.

My opportunity came from the Jungle Train. I saw that its track ran from the border with Thailand to the south where it joined the coastal line that carried on to Singapore. For most of the day, the train would rattle through the jungle and villages at the western edge of Taman Negara (literally "national park" in Malay).

My guidebook also explained that, for residents of the area, "the railway is the only alternative to walking." Perfect!, I thought and booked my ticket to Jerantut, a gateway to Taman Negara.

The train carriage was a grubby, rundown affair. Fabric on the seats was faded and dusty; a spring poked out of place and told me not to sit there - I didn't. Food trays from the seat backs and sometimes the toggles that held them in place were missing, though I could see where they'd been. Windows, dirtier than they had any right to be, were permanently opened inwards at a forty-five degree angle from the bottom of the frame.

But I didn't care. Malaysians in fezzes and head scarves crowded aboard and made themselves at home. Leaving from the Wakaf Bharu station at 6:33am, I could sleep knowing that my day would be full of the sights that locals see.

When the sun lifted its head about an hour later, a landscape appeared that was worth the price of admission - roughly $3.50 Canadian. Palm fronds and tree leaves swept at the sides of the train. Now a gap in the foliage and a field full of fog, quick as a flash bulb or a photographer's trigger finger: there suddenly and gone. Then a river, glistening and curled.

There was village life in between jungle scenes. At stations like Marek Urai, Bukit Abu and Dabong, men sat, elbows on knees, working the end off a toothpick with their teeth, and watched. Women watched, too, though only a little, and chatted or kept an eye on stray and possibly delinquent children.

Not many people got on the train. They often stayed in their seats as we pulled into the stations and out again, which suggested that they waited to meet people from this train or that one, or to get on a train going in the other direction. Or maybe, and very delightfully, it suggested that the Jungle Train's arrival was a major event in the village day.

Or perhaps the station was just a convenient place to sit and worry at a toothpick.

Families were in the seats as well as out the windows. The children were generally good, though one little boy discovered that I spoke English and decided that I was entertainment.

He thumped up to me, shouted "Hello!", smiled with his gawky and uneven teeth, and thumped off down the aisle.

"Hello," I said and waved, but he was already gone.

Thump, thump, thump, and he was back. "Hello!" Thump, thump, thump.

"Hello." I didn't wave this time.

Thump, thump, thump. "Hello!" Thump, thump, thump.

And so on.

Looking up after the last time he came past me, the boy's mother was talking to him. I smiled, remembering when I was a kid.

She was probably saying, Calm down! And leave that man alone. You're bothering him.

He chattered back, breathless and excited. But mum, he speaks English! And why do I have to leave him alone? He likes me! (He shot me a grin after this last part.)

Mum got her way in the end and he stayed at the front of the carriage.

Thinking about the scene later, I realized that it was like hundreds of versions of the same conversation I'd had with my own mum. The why-do-I-have-to-stop-doing-that conversation. I never found my mum's point of view that pursuasive, always asked why, and never got a satisfactory answer. I had to stop what I was doing, though.

It was funny because I'd come to South East Asia, taken this train, in search of the local experience and found more of the things that were familiar to me. That kid, having that conversation with his mum.

Sure the train rattles through the jungle, which doesn't happen anywhere else in the world that I know of. But looking under the skin of the local experience in foreign countries, peeling it back, people are more similar from place to place to place than perhaps is evident at first glance.

We all have the same conversations, though we have them in different languages.

Articles of Faith

Under a sweltering sun, I learn about faith.

The Batu Caves are home to Kuala Lumpur's (KL) celebration of Thaipusam, a three-day Hindu festival in honour of Lord Muruga. It occurs in January or February each year and I am there for this year's event.

I arrive on the last day, a Sunday, and the festivities are in full swing. Though the caves, in the distance and up a long flight of stairs, are where devotees make offerings to their lord, people also bear their burdens along the street below.

They are burdens to be certain. This is a festival of doing penance, of washing away sins, of being blessed. The burdens are the penance.

Some Hindus support kavadis, large platforms built with a metal framework that is attached to head, shoulders and waist. They are ornately decorated with different colours, feathers and religious figures. They bob in the heat, lifting then falling into themselves.

Other Hindus are pierced. To say that they are pierced doesn't exactly hit the point if only because the piercing, in most cases, occurs in an all-over-body sort of way. It's not permanent, either. People don't walk around the everyday streets looking as they do; I have the distinct impression that their adornments have been done very recently and will be removed at the end, which makes the effort even more impression.

Many of the pierced have hooks running through the skin of their backs, up and down in rows. Some hooks hold apples; others are attached to ropes held by other Hindus who hold back their charges when they strains too much. The skin pulls and stretches.

The piercings also include metal rods, spears and tridents running through cheeks and horizontally through the upper lip. There is no blood. All the pierced Hindus have the dazed and holy look of the penitent, but there is no blood.

Those who don't carry burdens of penance, carry burdens of a beat. Thaipusam is a celebration and drummers make music so the devoted can dance. To the crack and thunder of a drum, they dance. They dance and they dance and they dance.

One woman twirls and stumbles in the middle of a circle of people. She sticks out her tongue, eyes wide and wild and seemingly senseless to the world around her. She stops, takes a breath and keeps going. The sun beats down.

Away from the crowd - I am wilting in the heat - a Hindu man asks me what I think of all this. He is the one who explains about penance and washing away sins.

"For me, coming from the West, I have no context for this," I say. "It's madness."

The west coast of Canada is not an overtly religious place. There are probably pockets of faith to be seen, spaces for belief. But they're not very obvious and one would have to go looking. Largely, these places stay out of the light and the public spaces.

But in KL, articles of the people's faith are there to be seen: on heads, in backs and cheeks. Faith, here, is not Paul Simon's "island in the setting sun."

Faith, here, is to be celebrated and worn on the body, a badge of belief with no blood.

Snow Wash?

On the road, one expects to see things that require explanation. One hopes for foreignness. Curiosity and a need to know about other places are the reasons to leave home in the first place.

So it was with mounting interest that I saw a word I never expected to see in South East Asia: snow. There, repeatedly on signs leading to the east coast town ofKota Bharu, were the words "snow wash".

SNOW WASH. Snow Wash! SNOW WASH.

In different letters, different colours and different sizes, here were words I could not explain, advertising who-knows-what that I couldn't explain, either. And as Theroux wrote in his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, travel writing is about jumping to conclusions.

So, my conclusions...

A man ordered a snow wash, just because he was curious. Out came men dressed as elves and treated him to one. Those nasty little midgets took the man out at the knees and dragged him to a snow bank, which was carefully preserved in the back. They tossed him in, pulled him through and left him standing on the other side, shivering and miserable. He was no longer curious.

A man ordered a snow wash, just because he was curious. Out came five lovely Malaysian girls, dressed in robes of white and iced blue, to dance a ceremonial snow fall, or what they imagined one to be. They twirled and swayed and drifted around the man. He left thoroughly enchanted and ready to move his entire life to Malaysia.

A man ordered a snow wash, just because he was curious. A Malaysian stepped from out of nowhere and pasted him in the back of the head with a snowball. The man had snow trickling beneath his shirt collar. He was no longer curious.

Sadly, the facts were a lot less exciting than my conclusions dictated.

I fell into conversation with Kisham, a restaurant owner in Kota Bharu. His English was rather good so I asked the question.

"I gotta know. What's a snow wash?"

"It's a car wash," he laughed. "They have a big tube [Kisham here braces his hands as if holding the tube] that shoots soapy foam. It looks like snow."

Oh. All of my imagined explanations - the elves, the lovely girls, the snowball - and I end up with "it's a car wash."

Travellers like to feel that they're experiencing something new, seeing something that nobody ever would at home. They like to feel they're having an adventure and living to tell about it. The explanation of snow wash was something of a disappointment, entirely lacking any sense of drama.

That said, I satisfied my curiosity and learned something new: Malaysians describe foamy soap as snow.

Little Pieces

Kuala Lumpur (KL) challenges for the top of my Favourite Cities list.

Edinburgh, for sentimental reasons, is at the top. I lived there and remember its beauty and easy accessibility. I remember the grease that passed for food in the chippy stalls and the rough exterior of the people who ordered pints of beer from me. I remember my flat on Cornwall Street, whose kitchen window looked onto the stage door of the Royal Lyceum Theatre. Edinburgh was my first home abroad.

Barcelona, another favourite, was my best taste of Spain. Though in the minority for the first time and working hard to communicate, I had enough attention left to notice the variety of things to do. The plazas and cafes and people could keep a traveller occupied for weeks. Las Ramblas alone was worth days for its markets and hawkers and tourists.

The cities that impress me, then, provide a lot of different ways to keep busy: little pieces of people-watching and sight-seeing and good food all in one place. KL is certainly up to this requirement.

On my first day, the melting pot makes itself apparent. A man of Malay descent sweats over chicken satay and his grill pushes smoke onto the street theatrically so that passers-by seem to emerge from a thick fog despite the clear sky. Indian faces appear for the first time this trip, hawking shoes and watches and carpets and selling tandoori and masala and finger-scorching nan.

Sitting over noodles in Chinatown, I ask a question of the staff. "Do the Chinese people here speak Cantonese or Mandarin?"

A mute old man, whose small face is sunk inside puffy cheeks, answers with his pen. 95% Cantonese in KL, his note reads.

I sit back and consider and watch the different faces that walk by my table.

The next day, I walk to the gardens in the west of town. They offer flowers, serene little ponds and, from the hill, nice views over the city. There isn't the clatter of streets and markets, which are just a couple of kilometres away; only a park bench and my book.

My path to get there goes past the open and stately Merdeka Square, its fountain. I look up near the National Mosque and see skyscrapers super-imposed without controversy on the antiquated towers of the train station. It's a pleasant mix of old and new.

My last day sees a trip to KLCC. Here, servers in crisp uniforms navigate through tables of white linen and polished cutlery; the restaurants have clever names written in ornate letters. In the Petronas Towers mall, designer labels like Versace, Luis Vuitton and Calvin Klein keep cash entrenched in my pocket. I find a pond and a patch of shade behind the building and relax with everyone else.

This isn't an area for me to spend a lot of time, I reflect, but it's interesting nonetheless. From the centre of the mall, one can see, all at one, the six or seven levels of store names and commercial enterprise. The walls and walls of polished displays, the cash changing hands. Everything is available right here and people will pay for the convenience.

The Petronas Towers, their glitz and sheen, and KLCC are a long way from the rest of town. They do, however, add to the ambience of KL. They are a piece of the larger whole.

All of these places - KLCC, Chinatown, Little India, the gardens and Merdeka Square - are little pieces of occupation that entertain in their different ways and make KL a city of endless interest.

I'll be back in a few weeks to see what else I can find.

The Waiting Game (with Peanuts)

Peanuts are a good food for waiting.

Trapped in their cases, they are difficult to extract. I attack them with thick, lumbering fingers and a piece of shell comes off. Not enough, alas, to allow the insides to come free. I apply pressure once again and lose half the contents on the floor.

Crunching away on what's left, I have a go and the next one. There's a lot of focus in getting enough to eat from a bag of peanuts. Head bent, neck cramped, fingers worrying away at the little details, it's a couple of hours on the clock before the bag is finished. Time has wandered away.

I mention this because, of late, I have been doing a lot of waiting. A period of blankness has hit my travel: no sights to write about; no cultural events to observe. Just the waiting.

Everything started with a transition between countries. I travelled from Laos to Thailand in the space of three days, from Si Phan Don to Pakxe, from Pakxe to Ubon Ratchathani (Ubon) and from there overnight to Bangkok.

Great masses of time existed without anything to fill them.

The idleness really hit home in Ubon. Having eaten at the station, what was there to do in the five hours before my train departed? I did what any bored traveller would: grooved to the tunes in my head.

In a sweat-stained white dress shirt, hat perched - barely - on my head at a crooked angle, my head started to bob to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Sooner or later, I don't know when, my arms got into the act and I was rocking out on a train platform.

The dog that had been begging at my feet cocked its head sideways and took a step back. Two little girls - watching, gaping - stepped behind their mother. Who is this guy?

I ran out of songs and started people watching. A little boy had decided to pop the cap off a plastic bottle using only his feet. His first stomp sent a flip-flop flying. Retrieving it, he tried again. Success! The cap came off with a staisfying pop and he looked up, wide-eyed. Did I do that?!

When the people got boring, I wandered off and bought some peanuts. They were a revelation! The train started and with hours before sleep I spent my time emptying the bag: fumbling, cracking, tossing upwards, cursing, cracking again, looking on the floor, eating the rest.

Then the peanuts were gone and I could read my book for a while before curling up under my Thai Railways blanket.

With arrival in Bangkok, I sprang into relative action. A tuk-tuk took me into the centre of town and a guest house. From here, I booked onward travel to Malaysia and started another waiting game.

Waiting defines cultural experiences on the road. The trip to get from place to place, the hauling bags, the hanging around gives the people and places and sights their importance. They wouldn't be nearly so exciting without the work to get there, without the waiting. It's only a matter of filling the time, which is helped, ably, by peanuts.

Travel is nothing without its mundanities.

Polite People, Encroaching Tourism

Laos is a relatively untouristed country. The Rough Guide to Southeast Asia says that the People's Democratic Republic only opened up to foreigners in the 1990s and that many areas of the country are not much different to what they were when the French first arrived.

Indeed, the smaller towns and villages still live a very pared-down existence. Both Don Det and the village of Pakbeng get electricity from generators, which shut down at 10 or 11pm. Outside of Luang Prabang and Vientiane, most dwellings have a roof of corrugated tin or bamboo thatch. Most of the population still lives in the countryside.

Compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, tourists' needs are not accounted for and visitors have to adjust their expectations to the lifestyle around them, like water running around rock formations or islands in a stream.

One can see that Laos is new to having visitors, too, in the guilelessness of its people. They say sabaidee without prompting and never deny a visitor the chance to talk. Particularly in the villages, locals will nod and wave their greetings.

Even the language is friendly: the words for hello and I'm fine are the same. The result, during introductions, is polite, if repetitive conversation.

"Sabaidee," I say to a girl out front of her restaurant.

"Sabaidee."

"Sabaidee baw?" I ask.

"Sabaidee. Sabaidee baw?"

"Sabaidee!"

We grin and nod our heads vigorously, knowing that this is as far as the conversation goes. I sit down at a table and order food, pointing at what I want.

But even when the conversation stops, the courtesy doesn't. While I'm waiting for the night bus out of Vientiane, the guest house staff is having their evening meal. They invite me over and I politely decline. They insist and insist and insist and I drag a chair over.

The meal is do-it-yourself spring rolls. Plates of grilled fish, peanuts, rice noodles and fresh herbs crowd the table. Spicy hoisin sauce sits off to the side. Lettuce and cabbage leaves are there for wrapping.

We dig in. The Laotians laugh and say who-knows-what and laugh some more. They make sure I get enough, pile my leaves with fish. They ask if I like the food. Yes very good, I say.

I do my best to fulfill the requirements of their invitation: eat enough to be polite but not too much. My ride to the bus comes by and I am able to make my excuses without giving offence.

Even though this is likely the only food they'll have all evening, these people have no problem sharing with a stranger. It's the polite thing to do when the stranger is sitting off to the side, just waiting for his bus. Of course it is.

But Laotians are starting to deal with strangers in a different way and the signs of a changing attitude are everywhere.

Tuk-tuk drivers work their other jobs, like other Asian countries, though they ask their questions in a hesitant undertone, knowing that they're not supposed to ask them at all. Restaurants in Vang Vieng, an aberration in the country, play American sitcoms all day, everyday. The smaller towns are in the midst of major construction projects, setting up new guest houses and bungalows to meet the increasing demand of tourism.

On Don Det, a girl sees an opportunity when she returns a tourist's laundry.

"32,000 kip please [about $4US]."

"But yesterday, you said 20,000."

"Please mis-ta, my sister has to go to school." The line comes straight from the vendors of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

The man shows no sign of backing down. "You said 20 and that's what you'll get." He hands over the money and walks off with his laundry.

The girl stands, open-mouthed and staring for a moment, then begins chattering to her friends and looking in his direction. This is the first and only time that I see conflict between Laotians and their visitors in two and a half weeks.

So tourism is having its effect. Like water running down a river, it wears on its surroundings over time, changing them, etching in new shapes and patterns, molding them to fit the current and flow of the people who come to visit.

Laos is an island in the stream, whose banks are wearing slowly away.

The Pastoral Life

The sleeper bus down from Vientiane got my visit to Si Phan Don, the 4000 Islands, off to a rough start.

"Sleeper bus", for any traveller, is a term that holds ugly associations. The bunks on these buses wage war on arms and legs, on joints and muscles, on sleep. They're very short, you see. I had managed to survive many nights staying in them without serious injury, though others hadn't been so lucky.

"I have a bruise right here that's the size of your face!" said Khas, a 6-foot Australian in Hue, as he pointed to his hip. He limped over to pay his restaurant bill. "We'll take the train to Saigon."

I had high hopes for the trip to southern Laos. The bunks, if not long, were luxuriously wide. Hooray!, I silently exclaimed. Too soon, alas, and my hopes were dashed, nipped in the travelling bud. It seemed the width was to allow for two people's residence.

My bunk mates were an elderly Laotian and his cane. They had the inside half by the window; I, the outside. My legs stretched into the passageway searching for a kind of comfort.

The two next to me got up to use the toilet, right across from us, several times during the night. Without the commonality of a shared language, they resorted to physical gestures. Poke, poke. Oh, sure. Poke, poke. Okay, alright. Poke, poke. Again?!

I now know what it is to sleep with a 70-year old man.

After such an up-and-down, though confining experience, I spent my first full day on Si Phan Don in pursuit of exercise. The southern island of Don Khon was supposed to have a number of waterfalls and dolphins. I walked from my home on Don Det past dried fields and cows picking at trees and a solitary hut here, there. Trucks full of tour-goers charged ahead and covered me with dust.

An hour or so of walking found me at Somphamit Falls - somewhat of a misnomer. They were not so much cliffs that dropped water from a great height, as they were a collection of large rapids. Water crashed through jagged chunks of rock and, without settling for an instant, crashed again. At the very bottom, the falls became a stream that sang along as if nothing dramatic had happened.

I carried on and found where dolphins were supposed to make an appearance. None did, but the Laotian boys who swam and dove off the rocks and played made for a charming scene. Sunlight sparkled on the Mekong. They laughed. I stopped wading, put on my shoes and headed back.

My legs, the next day, complained about their exertions and insisted on spending time hammock-bound. Bread, cheese and fruit settled with me into a day of literary pursuit.

I read The Little Drummer Girl. There was Gavron the Rook in his castle on the hill. There was Kurtz running the thing for everyone to see, but for no one to know about. There was Charlie: sacrifice and willing participant. And Joseph. Oh, poor Joseph.

Flip, flip, flip, and Charlie had saved the world for some. I looked over my bungalow railing to see a farmyard fight in the making. A dog had a piece of bread at its paws; a rooster eyed him up, weighing his chances. The bird decided against certain death and retreated to look for other food. To scratch his claw in the dirt. To brood. Bugger.

These two were part of a larger country life. Two women rumbled a wheelbarrow by, stacked with bamboo. A group of men carried their picks and hoes down the track. Children played in the dirt or splashed each other in the river, and old women lounged in the shade, chewing their betel nut. It was a window on a pastoral world.

That, I suppose, is the point of travel: to see sights, people, ways of life that one wouldn't at home. I live in a city. I work in an office, occasionally wear a tie and take coffee breaks. I don't live in a hut, never use a pick or a hoe and wouldn't know how to fix the lack of running water in a shower - we lacked running water in our shower one morning.

I am not a country boy. Nor, I would imagine, is anyone else in Canada by Laotian standards. So it's interesting to see people who live completely different to me and other Canadians.

The waterfall was cool too.