Whose dumb idea was this train anyway? OK, mine, mine, mine. Next time I should listen to those in the know...
We are en route from Kuala Lumpur to Penang, known as the Jewel of the Orient, but believe me, this ain’t no luxurious Orient Express judging by the smell of the shitty hole-in-the-bottom-of-the-train toilet just a few feet from where the girls are standing. And yeah, it may look like they're are having fun but I AM NOT!! Because travelling long distances by train in the third world? It’s all coming back to me now! The endless bag carrying in the absence of trollies (and we have about a dozen bags to lug back to Canada), the to-ing and fro-ing, the waiting and the sweating, the standing in line, the Asian squat toilet where instead of a flush there is a nasty HOSE which you must try to use while also trying not to lurch your way INTO the toilet on a moving train. This is hard to do when you are plugging your nose with one hand and trying not to actually TOUCH the hose with our other.
And yeah, having our own little sleeper car seems fun and adventurous but in reality it’s a stinking, clanging, crashing, screeching, overnight stop-and-go nightmare from which I may never recover. Plus the smell of hundreds of people's poop is all mixed in with the gross herb-smelling cigarettes that everyone smokes.
Is it possible that the holiday that never ends is trying to tell me something?
At the risk of sounding all poor-me and everything, I can't help but be a little fixated on this nightmare Kuala Lumpur-to-Penang train thing (even though it looks not half bad in this picture) because not only did all four of us puke within 24 hours of leaving this train, but I had to puke over the back deck of an overcrowded ferry, surrounded by dozens of burkha-clad Saudi women peeking out at me in amusement from behind their jet-black veils. (There’s not much I hate more than puking but I must really add public puking to my litany of things to strenuously avoid.)
