Try Taking a Bicycle Down an Escalator - Day 42: Biking South from Bangkok

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Day 42: Kuala Lumpur to Port Dickson

We’d been in KL five days, in part because it was a huge, international city and quite intriguing, and in part because we’d been investigating going to Australia to work. When we set off this morning we were quite ready to journey on. We went first to search for the Sentral Train Station.

Not wanting a repeat of our dangerous highway experience coming in to the city, we were reluctantly resigned to taking a train out of the city. It took us an hour to find the station, riding around in the rain. We rode in to the station, wet and cold, to meet a wonderful silver lining: a Dunkin Donuts! We drank perfectly brewed ice coffee and ate raspberry jelly sugar donuts.

We asked what train we could take our bikes on, and were given different answers by five different employees, who shuffled us around to other employees. This became quite frustrating. Some people told us we couldn’t take our bikes on any train, at all. Another person said, yes you can take them, go and wait at the Intercity train desk. We took a number and waited one hour just to speak to a ticket agent. The ticket agent was not sure if we could take our bikes on the train and intense phone calling ensued. Finally, minutes before the last train was to leave, we were told that our bikes could come on the train, but only because the train wasn’t crowded. To get down to the train, we had to ride the escalator with our bikes. Not on our bikes, thankfully, but with them, holding on to them. I found this very frightening, but it worked out, and our bikes did not plummet down the escalator, crushing other people. We made the train just in time, after of course being informed several times we couldn’t take our bikes, and having to wait once more while security called up to the ticket desk to check.

The ride was only an hour but it took us safely out of the city. The ordeal took three hours with all the waiting and ineptitude but it was worth it for the relief from the anxiety we’d suffered on the way in. If we’d stayed on this train, we could have arrived in Singapore in eight hours. But we wanted the adventure of biking, and so we got off, enjoying a lovely day of riding along a quiet highway, with a wide shoulder and rollicking hills. Light afternoon sunshine, puffy clouds and hills of palm oil trees escorted us.

We veered off the highway, biking 6 miles through small towns to get back near the ocean, which was beautiful at 6:30, the sun glinting from it. Although the water was brown with trash washed up on shore. I forgot to mention that sadly, many of the waters off Malaysia are un-swimmable due to pollution from other countries. We rode through ugly strip-mall towns before arriving at a cute older town where we met Allan, a Malaysian durian vendor, who had previously lived in New York, Mass and Florida.

Allan loved us because we were American and he never saw any Americans so he insisted on treating us to some of his prize-winning durian, after a lengthy conversation. Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned before, durian is one of the most detestable, in flavor, consistency and smell, foods I’ve ever encountered. It tastes like two-hundred year old cheese and has the texture of a thick body lotion. Something about it makes me physically nauseous. As you can imagine, pretending to enjoy the fruits of this man's labour, was difficult. Even now, two years later, I feel ill just remembering being forced to eat only a few nuggets of the thirty-nugget interior.

We thanked Allen profusely, politely refused his offers of more durian, and allowed another kind local man to escort us by motorbike to the town’s lone hotel. It was a clean, cheap, tiny, windowless room, which suited us just fine. It was directly across from a huge Kmart-like megastore that had just opened, topped by an eight-story parking garage; both of which felt quite out of place in this seemingly small town.

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