The key point in that sentence was TRY. Travelling via public transport in Malaysia is by no means a cake walk, with touts trying to cop budget bus tickets, unlicensed taxis and train schedules that seemingly took two seconds to create and/or manipulate. We planned to take the slow ‘jungle train’ from Kota Bharu down to Jerantut to enter Taman Negara National Park.
Everything was going well until we woke up at 5:00AM to head to the station and after a 40 ringgit (very expensive here) taxi ride we showed up to a train station that was closed. Seemed kind of strange that the counter was closed and the train we were supposed to be boarding was at 6:30AM. When the ticket counter finally opened at 7:00AM we were told that only the express service was running and the slow train was not running today. WHAT!!! We went out of our way something fierce to ride it, and now we ended up on a normal train with way too much air conditioning, an extremely common theme in Malaysia.
So if you want to end up taking the jungle train take these tips into consideration:
1. Plan out when you want to go exactly, do not just show up and assume the train will be operating everyday (something we did)
2. Check the train schedules for Malaysia rail, the site is hard to navigate but can save you time in the end
3. Call ahead of time to make sure the website is correct
4. If heading south from Kota Bharu don’t get there too early. We arrived at 5:40 and no employees showed up until 7:00AM so we were hanging out with rats and lizards for a few hours.
5. Make sure you request to get on the slow train when buying your tickets
6. Commit some serious time to train travel – even on the express train we were 2 hours late
Cruisin' on the "Jungle Train"
In the end, we got to view the jungle scenery which was awesome for a while, especially around Gua Musang where there are huge limestone outcrops all around the station. However, after sitting on the the train for 7 hours it all starts looking the same, and after looking at the distance travelled we could have covered the same ground by bus a lot quicker. Slow train, fast train, its all an experience and it is definitely worth a try to see the Malaysian countryside.
