Better have your ticket ...

Crossing the Malaysia/Thailand border.
After leaving Taman Negara, we headed toward Thailand on the Jungle Railway. The Jungle Railway travels through the interior of Malaysia from Singapore to Wakaf Bharu, just south of the border with Thailand; we travelled only from Jerantut to Wakaf Bharu. The scenery was quite spectacular, but the train ride wasn't the most comfortable. Because it was a 'natural AC' car (i.e. windows down) exhaust from the engine got in and the soot adhered to the layer of travel sweat that our bodies always produces when we're on a train or bus; after a very short time we were hot, sweaty, and sooty. Eight hours later we were in Wakaf Bahru, and a short taxi ride after that we were in Kota Bahru, the last main town before the Thai border. After quickly finding a room, we headed to the local night market for some food. And what a night market it was! There were stalls selling a wide assortment of goodies from BBQ'd chicken on bamboo skewers to curries to roti (a kind of Malaysian pancake) to jellies and cakes. Surrounding the food stalls were tables and chairs, and surrounding those were stalls selling fresh fruit juices. Interestingly, the fruit stalls -- all 10 to 15 of them -- each had a television, and all but one were showing the same program.

The next day we took a public bus to the Malaysia/Thailand border. It was a very easy border crossing; we got our Malaysia exit stamp, crossed the bridge, and got our Thai entry stamp. A short walk later (about 1km) we were at the Sungai Kolok train station. We decided to cheap out and buy a third class ticket on a local train to Hat Yai; it cost only 42B (less than C$2)! But being a local train meant that it stopped at pretty much every station, which meant that it ended up taking us more than four hours to travel the fairly short distance between the two. But that was okay because we got to see an interesting side of Thailand that we hadn't seen before.

As some of you may know, there has been quite a lot of unrest in Thailand's southern provinces, the population of which is largely Moslem. There have been bombings, but the attacks have been primarily Thai on Thai; there have not yet been any attacks against foreigners. Although we didn't see anything overt to indicate this tension, each station we pulled into, even the smallest ones that were no more than a shed in a field, was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by at least one soldier armed with an AK47. And on the train, the ticket collector was accompanied by two armed soldiers. You'd better have a ticket!

For more photos, see our Thailand photo album.