Four countries in five days

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This blog was written on March 20 and Mach 24.




So I’m sitting in the ferry from Jakarta to Batam. It’s a Pelni ferry, which is the large company which runs fast ferries all over Indonesia and have a virtual monopoly on many of the longer routes. The ferry is spic and span in much the same way that Malcolm Turnbull has a good handle on the Australian economy - that is to say, not really. It’s also full of cockroaches, which, I hasten to add, is where the Liberal Party metaphor begins to break down. Actually I’m not even sure if these things are cockroaches, I haven’t been able to catch one. They look like cockroaches but they have wings. I understand that cockroaches can have wings, but none of the cockroaches I’ve seen in wood piles back home or in food markets in Cambodia had wings - it doesn’t seem decent for a cockroach to have wings. Maybe these are some mutant cockroaches about to take over the world, but everyone is always saying that cockroaches would be the only species to survive a nuclear holocaust (in much the same way that everyone is always saying that Eskimos have five hundred words for snow), so if that’s true, you’d think that they’re not particularly prone to mutations.

And the toilets! These are enough to give me nightmares, if it wasn’t for the fact that I have that thing where I never remember my dreams. Come to think of it, perhaps they have given me nightmares, I guess I wouldn’t know.

The guy next to me is very friendly; he later tells me that he is very keen to improve his English. We spend most of the trip chatting, sitting up on the deck drinking coffee, and suchlike, even when I’d rather be reading, or writing my blog, which becomes a bit annoying with him looking over my shoulder. It’s here that I realise how friendly Indonesians really are, though, not just to tourists but also to each other. Throughout the trip I have a hard time working out who’s travelling with whom, as the way my new-found friend introduces me to everyone, it makes me think that half of my deck must be travelling together. A few hours into the trip when we go up to the deck, I ask them, and no, they’ve just met, despite a few of them acting like best friends, having different first languages, being from different islands and different religions.

Everyone seems vague on how long the ferry trip will take, and I get estimates from 12 hours through to 17 hours. There are a few other tourists on the ship, but it’s massive, so I don’t see them again once we board, except for a dainty-looking Canadian man. I see him on the deck and after the usual exchange of traveller information he tells me that he’s been “living” (on a tourist visa) in Jakarta. “I love it” he says. I reply that this is strange as everyone says there’s nothing to do in Jakarta except save on cigarettes by breathing the pollution instead, or leave. “Yes”, he says “it’s horrible”.
So why is he living there then?
“Oh, I have a girl there”
Ah. So he’d see a different side of the city from what tourists see.
“Yes, in fact I haven’t met any other westerners for weeks, I’ve been kind of avoiding it”
OK then!

But when the ferry gets off, in the terminal he seems keen to find the next ferry together, which doesn’t work because he’s headed for Singapore and I’m headed for Malaysia. The ferry to Johor Bahru takes about the same time as the ferry to Singapore (about 90 minutes) and since I’m already way behind schedule I really need to get moving. My plan is to skip Singapore and race through Malaysia. I’ll probably need to spend a bit of time in Bangkok arranging visas and such-like, plus it’s a nice place. It’s a pity to skip Singapore, as it’s a nice city to visit, and also Malaysia, as I was last there over 10 years ago and I’d like to see how it’s changed, plus it’s a good country to travel in, cheap, lots of English, multi-cultural, nice scenery, etc.

The taxi driver speaks good English. Of course the first thing anyone tells you about travelling in a foreign country is “don’t talk about politics”; however I don’t think that rule applies to taxi drivers, who around the world are genetically programmed to be unable to talk about anything other than politics or what’s wrong with the younger generation. So I’m subjected to a half-hour earbashing, not entirely unprovoked, about how the West should leave Malaysia alone, and how the bumiputra are hard done by, with evidence for this ranging from Paul Keating’s most famous “recalcitrant” remark, through to the BBC and the Tan Ean Hung case. He doesn’t convince me, and I still think that “preferential treatment” for the bumiputra means discrimination against the Chinese and Indians, and that it’s a human rights violation that all Malays on peninsular Malaysia are legally assumed to be Muslim and can’t change this. As I leave he asks what work I do, whether I’m a journalist. I tell him that no, I work with computers. He says I should be a journalist. I’m now left wondering whether there is a class of journalists who do nothing more than sit all day around getting talked to by taxi drivers who listen to the BBC all day.

Johor Bahru is always called J.B., and is, of course, most famous for not being Singapore, and for having absolutely nothing of interest to travellers, unless they’re “travellers” from Singapore who come for the cheap food and cheap shopping. I arrived with no idea where in the city I was, which I hate. Wikitravel recommended a hotel which sounded really good, although it was about $AUS 25, but I felt like spoiling myself, so I took the taxi there.

I kind of assumed that being in Malaysia everyone would speak English, particularly when the girl at the counter appeared Indian. She seemed to have memorised the descriptions of the rooms in English, but wasn’t so good at anything else. The conversation went like this:
“Hello. How much for one room for one night?”
“WHAAAAATT!!??”
“Umm. One room .... for one night??”
“WHAAAAATT!!??”
Good gods lady, I thought, you’re the receptionist of a hotel, and I’m standing in a hotel lobby at 21:00 wearing a backpack and looking like someone who’s slept in their clothes. What the hell do you think I’ll be likely to be saying - “How would you like to save up to 20%!o(MISSING)ff your gas bill?”. I tried again.
“Do you have a room?”
“WHAAAAATT!!?? Yes, we have this room for RM 65, it has ....” she described the room
“Does it have air conditioning?”
“WHAAAAATT!!??”
“Air-con?”
“Air-con - have!”

Eventually i got the room. It was the first time I’d had a TV since I left home, but there was nothing good in English. When they advertised “TV” I assumed they’d have some good cable channels, but I guess not. The carpet was stained and had cigarette burns, but I wasn’t intending to sleep on the floor so that was fine by me. In fact, it was so comfortable that I overslept and wasn’t able to get in to the central station by 06:30 to get the train out of there.

This gave me the morning to wander around the suburb I was in. It turns out that the hotel was in a fairly out-of-town residential suburb, which explained why many people there didn’t speak English. I eventually took the train into JB Sentral Station. Here I found I had the option of taking an overnight train to Butterworth (or a choice of a number of trains to KL, which would add an extra stop). I wasn’t that keen on another overnight train since I really wanted to see some of Malaysia, even if only out of the train window. Also, I kind of wanted to take the “jungle train” through the centre of the peninsula, up to Kota Bharu. The next “jungle train” which would have any daylight in it was scheduled for 06:18 the next morning.

So I reluctantly booked that, which meant I had the afternoon free in J.B. I found a cheap hotel in the centre of town, a block from the train station. There didn’t seem to be much to do in J.B. central except shop. Shopping is less fun when you have to take it all with you. I couldn’t find a place to get on the Internet, which was frustrating, since I’d written the two previous blogs, and even was half-way through uploading one. There are two internet cafes in town, both really awful. There’s free WiFi all over the place, but you need an account, and to register for an account, as far as I could work out, you needed a Malaysian ID number or something. I even tried using the computers at the Internet cafe themselves, but they were ridiculously slow, and kept shutting down every few minutes. It’s the first Internet cafe I’ve been in where you couldn’t actually get onto the Internet. It was full, but most people were writing their resumes, playing games, or fiddling with excel. I think two people were using the Internet, I don’t know how. All in all a pretty frustrating experience.

The next day I got up early to get to the train station at 06:00. The train was scheduled to leave at 06:18, but left at exactly 06:48, coming from Singapore. So much for Singaporean punctuality. It’s an OK trip, but not as scenic as the Seat61 website makes it sound. It would be better if the air-conditioning worked. At least after a few hours lots of people left so I didn’t have a big Chinese guy sitting right next to me on the small two-person seats. The air-conditioning didn’t work, so they opened the doors, which enabled me to not feel guilty about ignoring the “Do not open the doors when the train is in motion” signs written in five languages (or is that four languages, with Malaysian written in two scripts?), and spend most of the trip hanging out the door taking photos. Around the Taman Negara (the imaginatively named “National Park”) area there were a number of fairly nice karst mountains.

So this meant I travelled the whole length of peninsular Malaysia in one day, but also meant I completely missed the muddy confluence. This is a pity, but hopefully I’ll get it on the way back. The train line does go through some jungle, interspersed with modern-looking medium-sized cities, large logging sites, and plantations. It’s OK, and it’s not much longer than going view Butterworth, particularly in terms of actual time (including overnight accommodation) so it’s a good way to do it. The ticket from J.B. to Kota Bharu was only RM30 (less than $AUS 14) which I think is fairly good value. About four hours from the end, a tourist couple got on, and it was good to have a decent conversation in fluent English again, plus someone else interested in hanging out of train doors to try to get good photos

One of the conductors on the train chatted to me briefly as we neared Kota Bharu.

“I myself have never been to Kota Bharu” he said, “I’m scared to go there” with a wry smile.

“Because you’re Malay.” I said, not so much as a question. Because he’s Malay, according to the government, he’s Muslim, so Kelantan’s implementation of Shariah law applies to him when he’s in the state.

“Yes I’m Malay. Kelantan - that’s the state of Kota Bharu - is very strict. Till this time I have never gone there. It’s getting a bit less strict now, now on the line you see the girls not wearing the headdress, but when I was a child they all wore the headdress when going to Kota Bharu.”


Some women on the train weren’t wearing the headdress yet but this wasn’t true for any women outside the train, other than the odd Chinese or other non-Malay. This is likewise true for what I saw in my few hours in the city. There’s quite a few Chinese, and they pretty much dress like westerners, but the Malay women pretty much all wear the headscarf and ankle-length dresses, although I think jeans are allowed. No-one covers their faces though.

“They have no bars or nightclubs in Kota Bharu” he said “But nowadays when they go to KL they always go wild. Whenever you see in the newspaper about someone doing something bad in KL half the time it’s someone from Kelantan”.

“Because they feel like they have no rules” I said

“Well anyway you’ll be OK in Kota Bharu” he said, “they’re not strict to Westerners”.

This is of course true, Shariah law is not supposed to apply to non-Muslims. It still seems like a fundamental violation of human rights though that the government feels it has the right to define that this train conductor is a Muslim, based on his birth, rather than his choice, particularly when it relates to states like this one.

Kota Bharu is the capital of Kelantan state, which has a rather hardline Islamic government. For a long time they have implemented Shariah law as much as they could under the limitations of being a state of Malaysia, a somewhat secular state. I think there was even some suggestion that if the Malaysian electorate wasn’t heavily gerrymandered, then places like Kelantan would be enough to elect a hardline Islamic government federally. I have no idea whether or not this is true, I’m a travel blog not a Malaysian politics blog. Anyway, the point is that Kota Bharu is a very Muslim city.

Perhaps because of this I might have had a bit of a bias against it. I found Kota Bharu to be a very modern, very neat, quite pleasant, city. Perhaps it was my bias, or perhaps the city is growing very quickly, but I did feel that there was something a bit too clinical, slightly Soviet, about it. But I was only there one night so my feelings aren’t terribly accurate.

I shared a taxi into town (for some reason the train station is about 20 km out of the city) with the couple I met on the train, sitting in the front of the taxi while they argued under their breath about which hotel to stay at, and while the taxi driver, who thought he could speak English, yelled at me in a jovial way.
“This NEEEEWWWWW CITY!!!!” he yelled urgently “In Malaysian ‘Kota Bharu’, in English ‘new city’. New Kota Bharu"
“But NOOOOOO BRANDY lah” - he grabbed my arm in much the same way that you might grab that of a somnambulist who is about to somnabulate off a cliff.
“umm, sorry?”
“NO BRANDY!!”
“Right”, I said, “No alcohol in Kelantan”
“Aiyah, Chinese tea shops also have lah!!!!” he laughed uproariously, as if this was the funniest joke in the world, you know, that one about the chicken ...
“Just brandy” I asked? Like most of my other questions this one went through to the keeper
“But not little coffee shops. Only big ones have.”
“Are there other shops where you can buy alcohol, like for the Chinese or Indians?”
“Yes, have lah!! But no Malays!” Now he was speaking vehemently, not supporting or attacking, just simple vehemence with no object.
“So non-Muslims can buy alcohol there, but not Malays”
“Ya Lah, Chinese coffee shop also have”
I tuned out of our erratic taxi driver and his fixation on Chinese coffee shops, particularly when he started speaking in what I can only assume to be tongues. The main points to be gleaned were 1) non-Malays can get alcohol in Kota Bharu legally, if they really want, but there’s no bars 2) the Sultan was going to the movies and this was gridlocking traffic around downtown Kota Bharu 3) the Sultan’s birthday (or some other celebration) is coming up, and I really have to see it in a week or two.

After he dropped off the bickering couple he asked me all sorts of questions about them, apparently unable to understand how a white man could be resident of Hong Kong or why he’d want to marry a Chinese girl. I made up answers to keep him happy. Yes they were married; yes they met in Hong Kong; no they weren’t students; yes lots of Westerners work in Hong Kong; no they weren’t planning to move to Canada. I hope I didn’t misrepresent them too much, it seemed to keep the taxi driver happy.




At the backpackers, where I paid the princely sum of RM 10 (about $AUS 4.50) for a night’s accommodation, I met two young backpackers doing a visa run. They’d both been doing separate round-the-world trips and found Thailand and forgot to move on. Now they’d come to Kota Bharu to get a six-month visa each. They were taking a taxi to the border tomorrow, which between two people worked out cheaper and easier than the bus.

Between three people it works out even cheaper. Sounds like a good idea to me. They were going to the Thai embassy to pick up their visas, I should meet them there at 10:00. This gave me an hour or two to do a quick walk around town. I walked down to the Muhammad Mosque, the war memorial museum, the central park thing, another museum or two, and the riverfront. There was a verse from the Quran gratuitously on display on the front of the park, in Arabic and, diluting its holiness by its presence, the Malaysian translation (in both the Jawi and Latin scripts), along with the reference so I could get on the Internet and look up the English translation. “"Peace unto you for that ye persevered in patience! Now how excellent is the final home!"”

There were a number of strange little statues on the top of other statues, which looked a bit like deck chairs. I’d wondered briefly about these on the way in. At the park I was able to make out what they were ... they were a book on a pedestal, it didn’t look like a Terry Pratchet novel, but more like the Qur’an. I guess it’s not OK to make images of people but images of the Qur’an are OK, because it is itself an image.

So I got back to the backpackers, saddled up my bags, and walked in the direction they’d told me. My bags felt heavier now, partly because I was tired, and partly because a lot of my dirty clothes were wet, making them heavier, and I was carrying my walking shoes (walking in my sandals) rather than wearing them like I usually do if I have to carry my backpack, because I had no socks that were even vaguely clean. It was very hot. The Thai embassy was a good 20 min walk away. I was pouring sweat by the time I got there.

We waited for a taxi. For the first time on my trip there was no-one shouting “Hey Mister, Taxi!?” or mumbling “Excuse me sir, where would you like to go?” or “You want to go Thai border?” or even “TAXXXIIIIII?”. This would, of course, be because we actually wanted a taxi. The embassy suggested we had back into the town centre. We saddled up our bags, and walked back the way I’d just come. A taxi stopped - “Thai border? Oh, cannot!” “Why not?” “No, cannot”. We finally made it back to just outside where I’d started from, and found a taxi willing to take us. It cost RM40, or about $AUS 18, shared between three of us. I sat in the front of the taxi while the young backpackers sat in the back and talked to each other about what is wrong with the world and how they would change it.

The border crossing was painless as border crossings go. Thailand recently changed its laws, I guess to make it harder (I don’t quite see how) for those people who live there by constantly doing visa runs, so that now if you get visa on arrival by arriving by land (unlike by air) you only get a 15-day visa. This should be OK for me, or I can always do a visa run

The town on the Thai side of the border, Sungai Kolok, was very seedy. Probably the seediest town I’ve been to, with the possible exception of Tijuana but I was only there for a couple of hours, and that seemed more like a parody of seediness. The plan was to hop straight on the first train (supposed to be in about 40 minutes) and get the hell out of there. The two young backpackers managed to get a seat on this train, but not for me, wanting to go all the way through to Bangkok, apparently it was sold out. “Sold out” seems to be a rather lose expression, as I found out from another traveller on my train, who found that they were “sold out” for him, before the tickets actually went on sale.

To prove to myself that I was a real backpacker, I opted for the Third Class ticket, thus saving myself some $AUS 54, or about three-quarters of the price of the ticket. This meant I had about three hours to kill (or be killed) in Sungai Kolok, which me and the travel warnings would probably agree is about four hours too long. I wasn’t sure if the presence of tough-looking soldiers with machine guns everywhere should make me feel more or less nervous. You know that look you have when you know that if you get separated from your colleagues there’s a small but not completely negligible risk that you will get kidnapped and possibly beheaded by Muslim separatists? Well that’s the sort of look that these soldiers were wearing. Sungai Kolok has at least one ATM, one rather shady looking money changers (the first land border crossing I’ve been to which didn’t have a bunch of moneychangers hanging around in the no-mans-land), one Internet cafe in which nine-year-old boys play car racing games, at least one fairly presentable electronics store, and one very posh-looking gold and silver store. I don’t know what it is with Thais and gold and silver.

At the ATM I miscalculated the exchange rate and accidentally withdrew the equivalent of nearly $AUS 1000, not $AUS 100 like I was intending. I’m struggling a bit with the various exchange rates, not so much in doing the actual conversions, but more in terms of appreciating what’s a lot of money and what’s not. Twenty Thai Baht can buy you a drink or a snack (it’s a bit under $AUS 1). Twenty Indonesian Rupiah is worth about 0.25 Aussie cents, and won’t buy you anything - I don’t think they make coins that small. Throw in the Malaysian Ringgit, and trying to juggle three currencies in four days is confusing me. I think I haven’t been getting enough sleep.

Anyway, the train trip was pleasant enough, despite the hard seats falling apart constantly, especially the first part of the trip. I found another traveller and we spent most of the trip chatting - anyone who travels third class is OK in my books - until he got off at about 22:00. He’s headed for the islands, a bit apologetically, because he’s the sort of person who travels third class, but you’ve got to do these things sometimes and he needs to recover from the jungle treks.

So now it’s 23:00 and I have another eleven hours to go. I’m kind of over it. Actually I was kind of over it about three hours ago. More and more people have got on, so I’m now crammed pretty close to the guy next to me so I doubt I’ll get any sleep. He’s a soldier, and looks tough, not as tough as the guys at Sungai Kolok and sans the machine gun, but still tough, so I don’t want to annoy him by falling asleep and snoring in his ear or anything. I’ve never thought of Thai men as “tough” before, but I guess some are. I intend to continue fiddling around till my computer battery goes flat at about 02:30, then sit there trying not to think about my sore arse for the next three hours before finally getting woken up after 20 minutes sleep by daylight and someone with a little trolley coming past trying to sell me rice for breakfast. I then intend to sort of zone out wishing I had more laptop batteries for another four or five before wondering what it is with all Asian nationalities about putting train stations in the most ridiculous places, getting a taxi to a hotel, trying to devise a way to give them all my dirty clothes - ie every scrap of clothes I have with me - to wash, before sleeping in the day and waiting for my clothes to be returned to me. I then intend to spend a few days in Bangkok doing all the Bangkok things - well not “all” of them, obviously - and trying to sort out all my visas for the next part of my trip where it starts to get hard.

So my previous few blogs were late, but this one is into the future, so that’s pretty good. Well, it will have been the future by the time you read this, since I won’t be able to post it until after I get to Bangkok.

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What is it with the expression “you can get anything in Bangkok”? I’ve had about three or four people say that to me at separate times in last week or so. Does it have some secret meaning, or is it literally true? Or is it like the thing about Eskimos? Last time I was in Bangkok I tried to get a pair of sandals that fitted me, but perhaps I didn’t look in the right places.

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I realise that the blog title is technically a lie, but "three countries in four days" doesn't sound as good. If I hadn't wasted a day in JB it could have been "three countries in four days". But I can say it's four countries because I did see Singapore!

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Photos

Thai Train
(this photo is out of order, belongs at the end of the journey). This is the only photo I got from the train from Sungai Kolok to Bangkok, as it was hard to get past the people to the window and as my camera battery went flat, and also the train was too shakey for photography.

ferry to Batam
my new-found friends on the deck

Johor Bahru
downtown JB

Johor Bahru
downtown JB looking towards the train station

train from JB to Kota Bharu
don't know what this is

train from JB to Kota Bharu
a river near Taman Negara

train from JB to Kota Bharu
karst mountains near Taman Negara

train from JB to Kota Bharu
a tiny prayer room at the train station of the no-horse town of Teluk Gunung. Not sure if there's a larger Mosque in town or it that's it.

train from JB to Kota Bharu
I had nothing better to do for fourteen hours than hang out of the door and take photos

Kota Bharu
Muhammad Mosque (named after Muhammad something, one of the 19th-century Sultans)

Kota Bharu
Muhammad Mosque again ... I was going to say that the Arabic text is the shahadah, but apparently it's not, so now I don't know what it says.

Kota Bharu
Independence Field where some of the early anti-british freedom fighters were executed. The monument is to World War 1 soldiers and also to a lesser extent world war 2

Kota Bharu
world war II memorial - originally the Mercantile Bank of India Ltd

Kota Bharu
riverside