Singapore To Bangkok By Train

In 1990 I bought a second-class ticket from Singapore to Bangkok with stops in Penang and Suranthani.

The old Pearl of the Orient was too clean for me. The Chinese president had ordered the city-state's police to fine people for chewing gum or not washing their hands after using the WC. Effacing the walls with graffiti has punishable with a rattan caning and possession of heroin earned addicts the death sentence.

At night the city was quiet.

The famous Long Bar at Raffles Hotel had been closed for renovation.

Gone were the 'girls' from Bugis Street. All transgender Bugis banci girls.

I was ready for another country.

To the north Malaysia stretched up the peninsula to Thailand.

The early-morning train departed Tanjong Pagar rail station. I bought roti and beer for the seven-hour trip to Georgetown, from where a ferry crossed the harbor to Penang.

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The conductor called for the passengers to board and we left the station several minutes behind schedule. Several westerners complained about the delay, but the engineer made up time through the Woodlands and the train crossed the narrow bridge into Malaysia..

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On the other side immigration officers checked our passports and we reboarded the train for the northbound journey. .

The train stopped at Senai, then traversed verdant ricefields into the thick mountain jungles of Segamat to arrive at the Malaysian capitol of Kuala Lumpur.

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The Central Train Station had been designed in a "Neo-Moorish/Mughal/Indo-Saracenic/Neo-Saracenic" by AC Normanhad and completed in 1897. The train stopped for a few minutes..

I ran across the platform to buy two can of ice-cold Tiger beer from a store. I had forty-five seconds. That was the limit for each stop on the Malaysia Rail.

The day was getting warm with the sun rising in the east, but speed of the train pushed air through the windows and I stayed on the side without any sun.

I bought another beer at Kluang.

Around noon the train pulled into Taiping. The hill station was reportedly the wettest region of the Peninsular, but the monsoon was months away and we traveled under sunny skies.

A beared Muslim man boarded the train. I put away my beer. Admad spoke of the Koran.

"Everything known is written in the holy words of Allah. It gives all answers."

Having spent the last six months in Indonesia, I did not challenge his statements.

Strict Muslims have no use for atheists.

Neither did Christians.

I got off at Georgetown. The Sultan Abdul Halim Ferry Terminal was a short distance from the train station. The trip across the narrow channel lasted twenty minutes. Penang was a beautiful city with ecletic melange of architecture.

British Empire buildings.

Chinese godowns.

Malaysian mosques.

Hindu temples.

There were beaches.

Jungles.

And funny hotels and ol bars catering to the few British left in town and good Indian food.

I stayed a few days extra.

I met a young British nurse. She was vacationing in South East Asia. Sara and I had a good time. No sex, but a good time.

But she was heading south and I was going north.

Sara and I bid fare-well at the train station. The train left on time. Sara waved from the platform. Here train was in thirty minutes. I sat by the open window and enjoyed the comforting sway of the train.

Past Gunung Jerai.

Through rice fields.

To Pasang Besar and the Thai border.

To the passport control I was just another westerner was heading Thailand. A bald Frenchman pointed to a sign proclaiming death for possession of drugs.

"The Thai are serious about drugs."

"So are the Malaysian and so am I."

I had no death wish.

We spoke on the train. He was traveling with a Grrman woman. She was just a friend. Michael lived in Pattaya. Maria made a face. Women didn't approve of that city.

"Come see me some time. It's the last Babylon."

"I've heard of it."

Everyone had heard of Pattaya.

Wicked had not shame there.

I got off the train at Suranthani.

A ferry ran tourists to Koh Samui. The day was beautiful. The weather was warm. The beer was cold. Paradise.

The sea at the beach was as clear as gin rimmed by coconut whte soft sand.

I rode a dirt bike around the island.

I met a girl named Vee. She worked a bar. We pretended to be boyfriend and girlfriend.

After a week I was almost sad to leave the island

The night train pulled out of Suranthani a little before sunset.

The 2nd Class sleeper was clean.

The food in the dining car offered a special menu for Thais. We drank Mekong whiskey with soda water and ice. The windows were open to the wind.

I slept in the upper berth.

The cleaning crew woke the passengers before dawn.

Bangkok was less an hour away.

I held off on breakfast and watched the scenery change from rice fields to factories to city..

Steel tracks split, as the train neared the station. The engine lurched to a halt. I checked my seat. Everything was in my bag or on my person.

I tipped the cleaner fifty baht.

The price of a big beer.

Hua Lamphong wasn't busy. Almost all the passengers was Thai. This was not the West. None of the trip had been and I would expect anything else.

It felt good to be in the Orient.

It was the other side of the world.

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July 11, 1994 Penang Journal

Penang

Hot

"Selamat jalan."

My departing words in Indonesian to Gulie at Penang Airport were to wish Juliana a good trip across the globe. Penang-Milan-New York. She's heading back to Manhattan, where my good Italian friend will have to deal with her separation from Giancarlo, her husband also my friend. Her entire stay lay under the black clouds of her future. If she expects people to take sides, they will. She left Penang angry with my imagined betrayal and abandoning her sick with dysentary on Langawi Island for an evening. I drank with a cute German, but didn't try anything. Never do after two beers. I drank a good five.

Standing between two people without choosing a side is never a winning strategy. I said nothing about Giancarlo leaving her for a young Jamaican nurse looking like a cad, but I never see any of her friends socially, except for Diane Brill and Maurizio. Anyway I'm in the shits with her.

Rob hasn't called from London. I asked Danny the hotel twice a day, if a friend left a message. Nothing. $150 short of a return ticket out of Kuala Lumpur. I didn't even dare to ask Juliana for money. So I'm stuck here.

The room at the Swiss Hotel has a noisy fan, but the bed comfortable, and the room clean, although I just saw another rat. Chased by a hotel cat. The overnight neon lighting in the hallway blinds even the blind. I'm sweating and haven't had a drink in three days. Oh yeah, I have been playing basketball down at Fort Cornwallis in the midday Sun with Filipino sailors. They are really fast.

Stranded. It could be worse. Breakfast at this hotel is good. Food here is cheap, especially at corner Halal Nasi Kandar restaurant on Julia Street in the shadow of the Anjuman Himayathul Islam minaret. The muzzein has a sweet voice and the restaurant serves a lovely iced tea and curry. I am not Robinson Crusoe abandoned by his shipmates. Just a broke poet.

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Much more to come__

Joyce's ULYSEES Unread

During the my 1991 global circumnavigation I carried ULYSEES by James Joyce from the USA through the Orient. The hardcover classic sat on desks in bungalows across Asia without my turning a single page to read the first line of the modernist novel published in 1922 in Paris. 732 pages. 265,000 words with approximately 30,030 distinct words.

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

I only read the first line today, yet carried the weighty hardcover from Biak to Bali to Java and beyond. I think I left ULYSEES in Penang, Malaysia. At the Swiss Hotel on Chulia Street. It was still there in 1994. I carried it to my room hoping the reunion might resuurect a desire to read the celebrated tome. Not a chance. I left it there again. Never to know anything of Eccles Street, Davie Byrnne's Pub, and the Ormond Hotel. nor any of the characters. I do not pride myself in this ignorance, bur millions have read ULYSEES. It has never been made into a movie and I respect that.

Confession of a pseudo-intellectual__

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Penang Gone

Sumatra was a lost world in 1990. Tigers prowled the western jungles of Indonesia's largest island, active volcanoes glowed in the night, and I drank Bintang beer with the ancestors of headhunters on the shore of Lake Toba 1500 meters above the sea and the night air was chilly after months along the equator .

Inside the traditional long houses skulls adorned the main beam of the roof.

Cutting off heads for the Bataks was an ancient tradition, until forbidden by the Dutch government in Java.

Sitting with several men around a fire I realized Jakarta was over a thousand miles away from the highlands. A hundred years ago I might have been a hapless victim of their deadly tradition, but they swore I was safe and the Bataks were renown for being true to their word.

After two weeks on Lake Toba I descended down the slopes to Medan, a Muslim city a little north of equator on the simmering Malacca Straits. The temperature and humidity were both in the 90s. Neither seemed to bother the residents.

That afternoon I booked a flight across the Malacca Straits to Penang in Malaysia.

I arrived there before sunset. I was back in the modern world.

Skyscrapers, telephones, air-conditioning and smooth roads.

I stayed at an old Chinese mansion off Chulia Street. The main travelers' drag offered good food and old navy bars.

Drinks were cheap.

The women were ugly.

.They liked a good laugh.

The architecture revealed a melting pot of culture.

I loved the call for evening prayers from the mosque.

I drank tuak or palm wine next to the Chinese temple.

The British had left their mark.

Beaches lay the the west.

Durians grew in the jungles.

The city was sleep-walking toward the 21st Century.

But that was then.

Chinese money had woken Penang from the past.

Construction was booming along the coast, as land was reclaimed from the sea.

Only the rich have rights to this dream.

And old Penang will never be old again.

Neither will I.

What a shame.