Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Choo Choo

We decided to take the train from Singapore into Malaysia. Due to the train company not taking Visa/Mastercard and us having dwindled our cash reserves down we ended up making two trips to the station to buy a ticket. There is no ATM at the train station. Another slight annoyance is that the ticketing system supplies the price as a single number. If you buy the ticket in Malaysia you get charged in Ringitts (RM) if you buy in Singapore you get charged in Singapore Dollars (S$). There are just over two RM to the S$, which effectively means we paid double price for the ticket which was slightly annoying. We'd decided to get the overnight sleeper, and the only ones they had left were the premium deluxe 1st class. It still cost less than two tickets to Nottingham from Lowestoft though.

At some point during our trekking back and forth to the train station, Gemma missed an obvious disabled ramp and fell and hurt her foot. This is the third time recently she has fallen on that foot. I'm afraid I wasn't too sympathetic because I was feeling grumpy already that day.

In the end we got on the train after queueing up in front of the immigration stand. The guy scanned us into the computer, gave us an arrivals card and waved us through to customs, who in turn waved us onto the train. He didn't at that point stamp our passports, but I assumed that would happen on the train or on arrival at Kuala Lumpur.

The compartment was very comfortable, with bunk beds, a telly, attached toilet/shower and a supper and breakfast included. We hopped off the train to deal with being stamped out of Singapore and off we chugged. Gemma liked the compartment so much that she remarked that she would've liked the journey to be a few hours longer! As it was we arrived into KL Sentral station at around 07:00. Although we'd slept on the train, because of the supper not arriving until quite late on and watching a film on the TV (about a boy and his pet cheetah), we only had a few hours sleep so I was feeling quite groggy.

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