Articles > The Golden Blowpipe

It began to rain as we rattled across the paddy fields towards Had Yai. All down the train passengers leapt to their windows. I struggled to shut ours with a sweet-smiling girl who had "Eat Fuck Kill" on her T-shirt, but we got it closed in the end.

Without a through draft the temperature climbed quickly. By the time a posse of military-looking men moved past, I was feeling distinctly sticky. But the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the sun was already steaming the water buffalo dry as a ragged chorus wafted back from the restaurant car. The military were getting stuck in to their Mekhong - Thai whisky.

Not many people have heard of the Golden Blowpipe. Far more have read about the Eastern & Oriental Express, the new-ish luxury train that travels between Singapore and Bangkok. Many a colour magazine has carried lyrical accounts of travelling in style through "jungle" but the three-day journey with E&O certainly doesn’t come cheap.

That sort of price tag means that the closest most ordinary mortals will get to the E&O is reading about it. But there are, and always have been, other ways. Travelling with the Golden Blowpipe et al you get far more jungle for your money, my total journey price was a tenth of the E&O price and includes one night in a hotel and another in a first class sleeper.

The Golden Blowpipe is the name of a railway. While the E&O travels the plantation-lined main track up the developed west coast of Malaysia, the Blowpipe's two trains a day turn right at a small junction called Gemas, and head through unhindered rainforest to end up at the eastern end of the Thai border.

The day-time Blowpipe - officially called the Expres Timuran - leaves Singapore at 8am. The glossier, chattering passengers all get off at Johore Baru, just across the causeway into Malaysia, to go shopping. By the time we reached Gemas the hard core were sitting patiently, the ladies demure in headscarves, the men uncomfortable in air-conditioning, their possessions tied up in cardboard boxes.

Half way out of Gemas station we came to a grinding halt. The driver hooted furiously until the guard appeared from the cafeteria and walked with exaggerated deliberation down the platform.

Thereafter we began to shed the plantations and move into rainforest punctuated by stilted kampung houses and jackfruit trees. Soon we were burrowing through a corridor of green broken only by the occasional cinder footpath used by the orang asli - Malaysia's aboriginals. This, I suppose, is the origin of the railway's name: the blowpipe is still used by the asli.

The train is the only way through some of this jungle. We reached Kuala Lipis as school was finishing, and the coaches were suddenly sizzling with children. At the beginning of the day I could have walked to the buffet car without meriting a second look; now my progress was greeted by half smiles and followed by a gale of giggles.

The Express Timuran suddenly, unaccountably, runs out of steam at a remote logging town called Gua Musang, surrounded by great buck teeth of limestone. At the centre of the main street, 50 yards from the station, I found the Gunung Emas hotel: with all the boiled water I could drink, and an arrow on the ceiling pointing towards Mecca.

The Gunung Emas is open 24 hours - and it needs to be. Gua Musang is so remote, that if you want to go anywhere you have to get up in the middle of the night. My connection left at a relatively civilised 5.29 am, to wind northwards through a landscape of mountains and mist.

The east coast railway crosses into Thailand, but the trains do not. So I took a shared taxi from Pasir Mas to Sungai Golok. The women in the back giggled every time my head bumped against the ceiling.

Compared to the relative austerity of the Malaysian trains, the 12 noon Sungai Golok to Had Yai was like a living village. Chanting vendors moved up and down the corridors with baskets of quail's eggs, lychees and pink pomelos; the "Eat Fuck Kill" girl had a monk as her travelling companion, and the toilet was a galvanised bucket with an emergency brake handle on the wall.

In Had Yai I had a couple of hours to spare. I would have quite liked a Thai massage, but I didn't want to end up with more than I bargained for. Why did Malaysian men flock to Had Yai? I asked Lingam, a respectable-looking and (by his admission) happily married Indian from KL. He shrugged. "Fish alone is not enough. You need meat and vegetables too."

The sleeper to Bangkok left at 6.40pm. I'd splashed out on first class, and found myself sharing with a businessman carrying two mobile phones. He was a crab meat canner, and he'd had a meeting that very day with the men from Sainsbury's, who asked him to try to include more lumps.

We talked gloomily about the economy - the Thai baht has been in rapid decline - then I lay back on the upper bunk and watched the thin sliver of moon skating across the salt flats.

The crab-meat man got out in the middle of the night, but I didn't wake until we were broaching the first of Bangkok's rambling suburbs. An hour later we came to a gentle, final halt in that great cathedral of a station, Hualampong.

Outside, fighting off a pestering swarm of taxi drivers, I glimpsed the E&O reception desk. I'd like to have checked-in for the journey back - but then there was the small matter of the price, and I would probably have needed a clean shirt...

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