Theroux Mk II: S. Thailand and into Malaysia
Considering S. Thailand and N. Malaysia are separated only by a 50m wide river, they are worlds apart: from the culture and religion to the desire to exhibit machine guns.
The 6:30am train from Hat Yai, to Sungai Kolok on Thailand's southern border is a feast for the eyes of anyone who’s spent too long in the European or Korean (or pretty much anywhere else for that matter) rat-race. My carriage companions slept or tried to sleep through the first hour's chugging and rattling through misty forest and wooden, stilted houses in homesteads without land-protecting walls. By 8am there was enough heat and light to evaporate the steam and reveal people working by hand in a grassy and forested monsoon-flooded land (October to March on this coast), bulls knee deep and white crane-like birds flitting around.
By Yala, most of the women boarding the train or zipping around on mopeds wore headscarves and ankle- and wrist-length dresses; men no longer stood to offer their seats. Minerets and pointed-arch windows peered over the house roofs at the soldiers and plainly-dressed teenagers holding machine guns. Seven armed soldiers boarded my carriage at Balo and were alertly attentive when a passenger shouted, into his mobile phone, and spun again when the brass bell was struck for the first of three times to signal the train's departure. Entrances to official buildings were protected by barbed barricades. , Dan the Thai Physics teacher was certainly right when he advised me yesterday not to go to Yala or Pattani due to the danger of, “Dangerous, not Buddha people [Malay Muslim Thais]”, and I wondered what rebels or cause all this military hardware was protecting us from.
The train continued past forested mountains, coconut palms and rubber tree plantations, the only man-made structures the black telegraph wires and posts always by the train’s side. The occasional stilted village surrounded a shiny, white and green, brick mosque, often gold-domed.
At the border town of Sungai Kolok I stiffly and nervously alighted and strolled through immigration, then across one time zone and the Kolok Bridge spanning the rivery border, flanked by rickety-stilted huts ankle deep in murky orange water, and into Malaysia. Here the men were much more hostile, frowny and pushy than their grinning counterparts across the river, though the women were smilier with life and at me. The full, Kota Bharu-bound bus had only nine males, and many head-scarved women moving this way and that between seat headrests to stare at the token Westerner who’d just boarded. Young ladies, lean and elegant in their long and colourful silks, giggled at my, ‘God I feel like an alien’ shrug and smile; the men continued to just frown. The bus cruised past houses rarely stilted or wooden on a road occupied by Peugoet and Proton cars rather than motorbikes. At 13:26, the roadside was thronged with robed and white-capped men streaming into the mosque of skeleton concrete and scaffolding, no waiting for building to be finished to praise Allah. Street signs surprisingly displayed the Roman alphabet, not the Arabic script that, for some reason, I’d expected. And not a firearm to be seen!
Kota Bharu, a Muslim stronghold and capital of this region, I know nothing about other than that the chilli fried rice and jelly with ice-cream is delicious. So a wander around the mosque and night market is on the cards before the next train journey, south through the Malaysian jungle. I pray there are less machine guns on that one.
The 6:30am train from Hat Yai, to Sungai Kolok on Thailand's southern border is a feast for the eyes of anyone who’s spent too long in the European or Korean (or pretty much anywhere else for that matter) rat-race. My carriage companions slept or tried to sleep through the first hour's chugging and rattling through misty forest and wooden, stilted houses in homesteads without land-protecting walls. By 8am there was enough heat and light to evaporate the steam and reveal people working by hand in a grassy and forested monsoon-flooded land (October to March on this coast), bulls knee deep and white crane-like birds flitting around.
By Yala, most of the women boarding the train or zipping around on mopeds wore headscarves and ankle- and wrist-length dresses; men no longer stood to offer their seats. Minerets and pointed-arch windows peered over the house roofs at the soldiers and plainly-dressed teenagers holding machine guns. Seven armed soldiers boarded my carriage at Balo and were alertly attentive when a passenger shouted, into his mobile phone, and spun again when the brass bell was struck for the first of three times to signal the train's departure. Entrances to official buildings were protected by barbed barricades. , Dan the Thai Physics teacher was certainly right when he advised me yesterday not to go to Yala or Pattani due to the danger of, “Dangerous, not Buddha people [Malay Muslim Thais]”, and I wondered what rebels or cause all this military hardware was protecting us from.
The train continued past forested mountains, coconut palms and rubber tree plantations, the only man-made structures the black telegraph wires and posts always by the train’s side. The occasional stilted village surrounded a shiny, white and green, brick mosque, often gold-domed.
At the border town of Sungai Kolok I stiffly and nervously alighted and strolled through immigration, then across one time zone and the Kolok Bridge spanning the rivery border, flanked by rickety-stilted huts ankle deep in murky orange water, and into Malaysia. Here the men were much more hostile, frowny and pushy than their grinning counterparts across the river, though the women were smilier with life and at me. The full, Kota Bharu-bound bus had only nine males, and many head-scarved women moving this way and that between seat headrests to stare at the token Westerner who’d just boarded. Young ladies, lean and elegant in their long and colourful silks, giggled at my, ‘God I feel like an alien’ shrug and smile; the men continued to just frown. The bus cruised past houses rarely stilted or wooden on a road occupied by Peugoet and Proton cars rather than motorbikes. At 13:26, the roadside was thronged with robed and white-capped men streaming into the mosque of skeleton concrete and scaffolding, no waiting for building to be finished to praise Allah. Street signs surprisingly displayed the Roman alphabet, not the Arabic script that, for some reason, I’d expected. And not a firearm to be seen!
Kota Bharu, a Muslim stronghold and capital of this region, I know nothing about other than that the chilli fried rice and jelly with ice-cream is delicious. So a wander around the mosque and night market is on the cards before the next train journey, south through the Malaysian jungle. I pray there are less machine guns on that one.
posted by Graham, Manchester at 7:55 am
<< Home