On the rumbling, slow train from Gemas, southern Malaysia, I’m seated between a family of seven Tamil-Malaysian women, tiffin boxes clanging as they offer me some lunch. After snapping the obligatory selfies, we have a chat about marriage – they’re on their way to a family wedding in Johor Bahru, a big city and land gateway to Singapore. The train lurches, stopping and starting.
It’s the last stretch of track in Malaysia without a high speed service and the gentle pace gives me cinematic views of seemingly endless fields of palm trees, occasionally punctuated by colourful, faded village homes. Even the elegant old gents cycling on the road parallel to our track are moving faster than this train. “I want to marry an Englishman,” says the teen sister among the group, third of the four generations of women and head babysitter. I tell her I don’t have any suitable cousins, but wish her much luck with the plan.
I’m on my fifth train in five days. These are the final few hours before I reach my final destination, Singapore, for its annual Writers Festival, one of the world’s only trilingual literary events.
Having never been to Malaysia before, and blessed with some time between stops, I opted to travel by land, taking in one of Asia’s greenest and most multicultural countries along the way
You don’t have to tell me that flying from Bangkok to Singapore would have been faster. But having never been to Malaysia before, and blessed with some time between stops, I opted to travel by land, taking in one of Asia’s greenest and most multicultural countries along the way. The spacious, comfortable trains here have no luggage restrictions on board, meaning I can haul some treats from the Thai capital, and they offer captivating, scenic landscapes along the way – not to mention the friendly locals to chat to.
I board the night train from Bangkok five evenings beforehand, taking the recently reinstated Special Express 45, which leaves the capital’s charming old Hua Lamphong station daily at 3.10pm. I feel a twinge of excitement as I trundle my case over the marble tiled floors, just in time to take my two-person-wide seat on the night train. This feels so much more exciting than waiting, bored, at an airport gate for a two-hour-25-minute flight from BKK to SIN. As we set off, I spend a few hours gazing out of the…
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