Traveling non-adventures

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing some marathon traveling. I had about five hours on a boat, then another hour-and-a-half on a bus. This put the time at about 4:30 pm. I then had to wait until 2 am for my train. The wait was fairly uneventful, but I did get to try wild boar stir fry. The meat was flavorful and not too chewy, but the chef decided to include many chunks of skin and fat, which detracted from the experience a little.

I also saw an old man walk doubled over like a hunchback past all of the people waiting for the trains, asking for money as he went along. But as soon as he was about twenty meters past everyone, he stood up and walked away completely fine.

My train was quite late, so I didn’t end up leaving the train station until almost 4 am. I caught a few hours of sleep, but it was the most unstable train I’ve ever been on and on several occasions I actually feared that the car might tip over. The train took about ten hours, then I hopped on a motorcycle for the last kilometer to Malaysia. Security ran all of my stuff through an x-ray, but they said nothing about the two bottles of whiskey I was carrying. I couple I met later had picked up a kitten somewhere on their travels, and when they got to the x-ray the guy just said, “Um, I have a cat in my hand,” and security just waved them through. (Moral of the story: Hide your illegal things inside your kittens.)

Once through passport control, I took two separate slow and un-air-conditioned buses to the pier.

Because my train was late, I missed the last boat to the island. I got a room on the mainland that is really, really cheap ($6), but while I’m writing this I get to hear the guy in the next room try to cough up all his bodily organs and it sounds like he is actually in the bed next to me. The walls may actually be built out of several layers of construction paper.

So tomorrow I take a short boat ride and I will finish a trip that began almost exactly 48 hours previous. Hopefully I can find reasonable (quality and price) accommodations over there, and unless I get really bored I’ll stay on the island for my entire time in Malaysia.

Lastly, I no longer have a camera, but I might borrow my friend's so I can get up some photos of the island.