The jungle train south through Malaysia

Another pre-dawn get up (4:30am) to catch the local 'jungle train' south to Jerantut for the Teman Negara National Park (jungle treks place).
The jungle railway is an incredible feat of engineering, cutting through 100s kms of mountainous jungle area, beside steep embankments, over rusty iron bridges and through tunnels fascaded by hefty stone blocks. How was this surveyed before its 1931 completion?
Through the morning mist I peered at hillsides of misty jungle, but also great tracts of single species plantation (rows of palm or rubber trees) extending for miles in each direction, and even worse, completely deforested hillsides of terraced orangey clay that host pathetic patches of grasses and is being washed out of rain-cut gullies. Why is Man destroying this beautiful chaos for ugly, only temporary, order? Thankfully, the further from civilisation the more intact the jungle.


Misty morning jungle :)

Plantation :(



Bare-stripped hillsides :(

By 10am the mist had evaporated and the train and sediment-laden Willy Wonka rivers (of colour and viscosity) meandered sluggishly between 2km high, triangular mountains covered in pristine jungle, and past trees housing families of grey monkeys. Every 20 minutes or so the train stopped at stations ranging from barn-like, with platforms and benches and built with old railway sleepers, to nothing more than a bus shelter beside a dirt track and a couple of wooden shacks. The steep embankments cut along hillsides were so close to the train that I couldn't lean out the window without being whacked by branches.

One of the 'big' train stations

The train itself is a REAL train: one of the 3 carriages an art deco dining car, air con provided by doors and windows permenantly jammed open (though the wind was like a giant hairdryer on full heat today), the chug and jerk of the deisel engine and carriages held together by great rusty hooks visible below the between-carriages planks. I can see why railway enthusiasts get enthusiastic; broad and comfy seats, and similar-minded train geeks marvelling at the great views.

In the dining car, eating a banana omelette out of a newspaper sheet containing an article about the Thai golfer Pornpong Phatlum, the stark behavioural differences I've frequently observed between Western and Muslim males were being played out (there were few women ever in the dining car). Whereas the Westerners chat, read or dreamily gaze out of the window, the Muslim men and teenage boys just sit and unashamedly stare, frown and look a little disgusted at us over their treacley coffees, or gaze with sleazily half-closed eyelids and tut (in frustration that they don't have it?) at white women or the chests of Western-dressed Muslim girls. When the teenagers sat opposite us occasionally spoke, the comment seemed derogatory and the reply usually a sneer.

I returned to the civility of the other carriage just as we arrived at another shed-like station, boarding boys wearing fake Man U, Liverpool, Arsenal, England and Brazil shirts, or hand-me-down InUtero tour and Linkin Park T-shirts strolled cockily down the train. I thought this was supposed to be the jungle?! In contrast, the 20 or so schoolgirls who also boarded wore purple and lilac headscarfed uniforms and were too shy to smile or take the carriage's only seat, next to me.

Prettily-dressed multicultural commuters

After 11 hours we finally pulled up at Jerantut, and took a minibus along a tarmaced road through jungle (I know, I know, hyocrite) and mile after mile of depressing palm plantation to Kuala Taman village, the gateway to the 130 million-year-old Teman Negara jungle...