The Jungle Train

Post date: 30-May-2011 17:50:03

I found that - and more. I stopped off half way at Kuala Lipis (= middle of nowhere), and stayed in a kampung called Kuala Medang with a family who spoke no English at all, playing jacks with their little girl, then carried on to Kota Baru where I carried on my Malay practice with a very underutilised taxi driver in the rain. Booking this escapade was the first part of my adventure. My friend had seen something about the Malaysian homestay programme on Singaporean TV but details were scarce and by the time I found the website on Friday, the "Visit Malaysia" tourist office that could have helped me was closed for the weekend. Since I was planning to head off at 4.30am on Monday, I had to take matters into my own hands and call Kuala Lipis myself. I reached Pak Mohammed only to discover he didn't speak any English. In halting Malay I told him I'd call him back tomorrow, planning to enlist a friend's help to book. When I got off the phone I realised that copping out to a friend was not the point - I was supposed to be learning! So I asked my Aunty Lee Leng if she had a Malay dictionary. She lives in a big house with a lot of books so the search was on. In the event we came up with a pamplet from the 50's teaching "Bazaar Malay" to British servicemen. Really, it should have been in a museum somewhere. Nevertheless, with this I went on to book my stay and pick up from Kuala Lipis station at 1.30 on Monday.

I thought I ought to tackle my journey with more resources than my Bazaar Malay pamphlet so Sunday, before leaving, I went to the local bookshop to pick up a proper Malay dictionary. Singapore has 3 official languages, English, Mandarin and Malay, to reflect the diversity of its populace. Not that you'd know it from the dictionary section of Times Bookstore, Holland Village. All that was on offer was a sorry looking phrasebook. On principle I took the manager to task about it (he claimed he'd just sold out of the last dictionary but we both knew he was lying), but I was running out of options, so the sorry phrasebook it was.

On the train into Malaysia you knew when you'd left Singapore when the rubbish started appearing by the tracks. The train was slow, stopping everywhere, but offered great scope for jungle and people-watching and went right through the heart of small towns with odd looking stations that definitely had some Victorian design features. Admittedly the jungle-watching wore thin quite quickly and one plantation looks much like another though. I had bought curry puffs and snacks in Singapore station and quietly munched on these as the sun rose. I perused the sorry phrasebook wondering at the person who had written it. There were 3 ways to order wine, a glass of wine, a glass of red wine, and a bottle of wine. Wine is not something that’s readily available in non-English speaking restaurants in Malaysia. Ways to order a beer were not given. The small dictionary at the end of the book was equally baffling. They gave the word for a horse (not a native animal and probably only seen on racetracks), but not a monkey, ubiquitous. Everything was definitive - there was no word for if, but or maybe in the whole thing so you either went somewhere and did something, or you didn’t, there was no scope for alternate possibilities. I began to wonder if I should have stuck with the Bazaar Malay, because this was bizarre Malay, and came to the conclusion that the author was a pedantic alcoholic with a gambling problem, who’d probably never actually been to Malaysia.

When we arrived at Kuala Lipis (on time), I looked around expectantly. No sign of any Pak Mohammed. Um. I think the literal translation of what I said was "look me tomorrow Kuala Lipis station one and a half o'clock". I definitely hadn’t said “maybe” I’ll be there, or “if I don‘t miss the train” since that was not part of my vocabulary (I had to text my mum later, to get those words). There was a tourist office there but it looked ominously closed. I peered desperately through the tinted windows. A passer by sensed my panic and offered to call Pak M, and was just doing so when he appeared, with 2 other friends in tow. Apparently they'd been early and popped off for a snack. That's very Malaysian - any opportunity for food.

Now some people might doubt the rationale of a single woman getting into a car with 3 unknown men but I was encouraged by their new T-shirts with the "Visit Malaysia" logo brightly embroidered on the shirt pockets so carried on. We managed to make conversation in stilted Malay and English in the car, and I was eventually deposited in a Kampung called Kuala Medang, at the house of a woman whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to feed her guests as much food as possible. Four meals a day seemed standard, along with visits to see the “kampung industry”, many of which seemed food-related like fish farming, fruit growing and juice pressing, noodle making, rubber tapping, rice planting and threshing, elephant ear making (a type of snack), and dodol making, which is made from coconut milk and palm sugar cooked down to a type of toffee.

Overall, I enjoyed her cooking much more than I expected (never having liked Malay food all that much), and I helped her with some of the cooking. The single worst dish I ate though (and it’s fairly high on the all-time worst dishes list) is when I brought home a fish that I’d fished in the village fish ponds - a kind of catfish. This appeared on the dining table looking rather yellow and pungent - a durian fish curry. Now I will eat durian - many people won’t, it’s a pretty stinky fruit - but I do think the fish/durian/curry combo is the worst of all possible smelly worlds. I can‘t think of a better use of the word foetid. Even worse of course I was expected to eat quite a lot of it because I caught the bloody thing. That was one recipe I did not ask for.

Quite a lot of curry puffs