Train: Johor Bahru - Malacca

How narrow the gauge became clear at Kulai where we had to wait for the south bound KL train to pass before we could proceed. Less than an hour out, second stop. Three or four minutes of reversing and backing into a siding.
         The standard gauge was known from boyhood by the line at the end of the street: too widely spaced to achieve the standing leap from one rail to another no matter how you bent your spine and lurched.
         Here, even the mature man, even a short-legged Malay, could manage effortlessly.
         It brought back the Balkans too, where the colonial powers—both Ottoman and Austrian—only built narrow. Sufficient to get the raw material out quickly and cheaply.
         Yellow painted country stations with ticket offices built to local scale, fringed by colourful shrubs and flowers. Whistles and green and red flags employed by dark men in smart sky-blue uniforms.
         By some luck of seating, on every stop the small, nuggety dark man stood directly outside the window with his flags resting on his shoulder, a momentary smile raised when the guard in the rear gave his answering whistle.
         The train’s whistle came at the crossings where other dark and blue men manned gates that had halted traffic.
         At the first three or four stops the driver and crew, including the ticket inspector, dismounted and sought a bench for a leisurely smoke. Older men and younger together like in a silent film in a couple of places, the flowering smiles given from each to each like the proverbial nosegay.
         The dark skin, black hair, the deeply coloured uniforms made the smiles blaze.
         Even at the first stop, not twenty minutes out from J.B., the men all came out and disported on the benches. Given the interval, there was not a great deal to say to each other, but the pleasure in company again was evident.
         Palm oil plantations endlessly. In preparation for the trip an earlier traveller had mentioned the palms. News reports had of course come over many years.

         The tree-rows seemed an assault upon the land, like a Napoleonic order of forces; a virulent pestilence. Agribusiness writ large. Remnant jungle showed itself only here and there against small cultivated fields.
         Almost nothing of houses and certainly no kampungs. At one clearing suddenly, interrupting the jungle and the palms, a golf course of what might have been only one or two holes. After so many months in Geylang Serai, and then the two trips to Johor Bahru, it was not possible to figure a Malay golfer; this was something that defied imagination.
         At a work-site along the track one of the men had covered his motor-cycle with palm fronds. On the ride home the metal wouldfail to sting.
         The housing must have been further out. The traditional Malay kampung houses in maroon colouring only appeared in numbers from the bus along the last stretch from Tampin to Malacca. The flow of air underneath no doubt gave relief from the heat and storage from the rains was afforded.
         Apart from palms and jungle the short, squat, broad-leaved trees may have been rubber, with hessian sacks strung up in the branches.
         It took a time to recognize the durians. As far as one could judge there were no plantations, just the odd tall, slender trees here and there hung with small clusters high up against the trunk. In the first instance the impression was of some kind of wild bee-hives.
         Around Tampin the first livestock in a twelvemonth almost, scaled-down, mostly humped young cows. In Singapore these were the breed mounted on the walls encircling the Hindu temples—not mythic creatures after all.
         One common building repeated numerous times along the rail-line stood out from the green.

         No-where was there evidence of churches, mosques or temples. Christians, Muslims and Buddhists had not left an impression along the line. What one saw was Hindu temples, perhaps a dozen stretching from the further outskirts of J.B. and on northward.
         Some were ornate and elaborate, with the sci-fi like figures in pastel tones. At one place there stood in a small clearing close by the track a kind of dolls-house size shelter, roughly constructed and covered with what looked loose corrugated iron on top. The structure had been raised on four posts; a kind of farmer’s out-building. Under the roof there were two animal figures at either end, the larger with the appearance of a horse, when it must have been a cow or elephant. The other smaller couldn't be made out at all. Wall-less shelter; almost certainly the statuary was inanimate. Within worshipers could do little more than prostrate themselves in that space.

         The train ran less than rapidly; indeed, in the first hour and half it seemed no more than jogging pace.

At minimum one dozen small temples for the ghosts of the rail-line and the earlier plantations. The Chinese coolies had been employed in the tin mines.