Читать книгу George Fetherling's Travel Memoirs 3-Book Bundle - George Fetherling - Страница 10

At 1400 hours I was waiting on the platform at Hat Yai for the overnight train to Bangkok. I was still waiting at 1430, 1500, 1530, and 1545. Between departures and arrivals, some of the women operating battered food carts left the plastic crates they used as seats and curled up on wooden benches, putting scarves over their faces as protection from the sun. Let their children tend the stands for a while. Later it would be the kids’ turn to nap. All the while, weary soldiers shuffled up and down. For my part, I was feeling was quite patient, perhaps uncharacteristically so, for I already knew at least something of both the pleasures and the hardships of Southeast Asian rail travel. I was anticipating the former and resigned to the latter.

I had read about and heard about the so-called jungle train in Malaysia that departs Jerantut Station in KL and runs northeastwardly through Kelantan, the province said to be centre for the country’s most militant Islamic fundamentalists. My understanding is that it takes ten hours or so to crawl nearly five hundred kilometres through the jungle, past banana plantations and such. The destination is a small port on the South China Sea. I’m told there are always far more passengers than seats and that the atmosphere is hostile to foreigners. Hostile to everyone’s health, as well; many of the windows are broken out to admit a little air. It all sounds a great deal grittier than the jungle train that used to carry crops across Costa Rica to Puerto Limon on the Caribbean, a journey I was lucky to have made before the entire right-of-way was destroyed in an earthquake. I was similarly well informed about Cambodia’s now virtually non-functioning rail system a couple of decades ago, during the last phase of the country’s civil war. In addition to pulling the carriages, the locomotive also pushed a flatcar ahead. When rebels in the hills would begin shooting at the train, Cambodian troops, crouching behind some sandbags on the flatcar, would send a few mortar rounds in the general direction of the enemy. Westerners enjoyed the privilege of riding the train for free, or almost for free, so long as they rode on the flatcar. Sometimes the engine would push two flatcars. The job of the first one was to trigger mines that might have been attached to the rails.

Finally, the No. 170 to Bangkok arrived and we boarded in a jumbled rush. Simply by looking out the window, one would never suspect that this train passes through such newsworthy territory. Only 8 percent of Thailand’s 68 million people are Muslims, but they constitute the majority in the four provinces closest to Malaysia. These are Yala, Narathiwat, Songkhla, and Pattani, where, for six or seven years before the trip I’m describing, ethnic Malays had been fighting to make an independent Islamic state of the strictest sort. Several thousand people had been killed, some by the insurgents, some by the Thai army. Rebel tactics have included bombing nightclubs, burning schools, and knocking out power grids. Beheadings, however, are what seem to frighten Thais most of all. Each time there is a new rash of decapitations in the south, the authorities in Bangkok respond with fresh resolve and then declare victory. And so it goes.

There were no berths available when I purchased my ticket. My seat faced the rear of the train, so that I saw the landscape unravelling counter-clockwise, so to speak. The click-click of the rails was matched by the rhythm of the countryside popping up and then quickly vanishing down the right-of-way. There were big stretches of open country alternating with fields and paddies under cultivation. Safely in the distance, brown mountains. But at what seemed almost to be regular intervals little hamlets would whiz past, with a home or two, some vehicles, some buffalo, a stand selling local produce, and either a wat or a mosque. In each case, a sign announced the name of the community, but I could find no such places on the fairly detailed road atlas I had brought with me.

The carriage was full of Muslim women with diamond-shaped Malay faces, travelling in twos and threes, with baskets and tote bags full of food for the journey. I was surprised at how easily they laughed; they were having a good time, or at least making the best of a tiring trip. From across the aisle, an especially cute infant gurgled at me and I smiled in return, which obviously pleased the mother, who said something in Thai that sounded quite friendly. But this interaction brought a fierce scowl to the face of the young man sitting opposite me. He was in his late twenties and was better dressed than the other passengers, including your correspondent: well-shined shoes, tailored slacks, an expensive-looking belt, a crisp white dress shirt, a costly watch, an MP3 player jabbed in his ear. For the next few hours he stared at me: the real snake-eye treatment. Later, a food vendor passed through the carriage, doing brisk business. This was a signal for me to take my own bag of goodies from the overhead rack. I smiled and offered the other fellow some, thinking I might get at least a faint nod. He did not react. I began to wonder whether there was trouble in the offing. He was still staring when the sun woke me (and the entire complement of babies). With the exception of this one suspicious young Muslim in secular Westernized attire, everyone else was rumpled and bleary-eyed as we began rattling through the outer slums of the capital. Moments before we reached Hualamphong Station, we both stood up at the same instant, I to reach for my bag, but he to reach inside his pocket. He pulled out a tiny digital camera. Using gestures, he asked me whether he could snap my picture. I was surprised. He put his thumb and forefinger round the corner of his mouth, indicating that I should smile. I smiled. Then (finally) he smiled, and we disembarked and were individually subsumed in the morning’s rush-hour crowd.