It was 2007, and i was on my way back home. This is a sight all too familiar to me, or maybe to some of you who take the railway to Malaysia. Yes, this is Malaysian railway.

I suppose i’m one of the very few that actually enjoy the train rides. Yes the trains are always late; yes they take many hours more to reach home, compared to coaches. Still, i don’t mind.

It’s cliche to say that it’s the journey that counts, but it does. To me those train rides were like gateways in between lives; like a rite of passage between the duality i maintain – the busy urban life in Singapore and the quiescent life in Seremban (which is, like how i like to tell people, a small town 40 – 50 minutes drive away from Kuala Lumpur.)

The railway takes a different route, it’s not as straightforward as the highway. Instead, it weaves in and out of cities, towns and forests. I like seeing the blur of green outside of the window, when the train whizzes past plantations (for Malaysia has a lot of oil palm plantations.) I like watching the way cars and motorcycles hum along the dusty roads in small towns, where many colonial shop houses still dot the streets.

The long train rides gave me time to think, and to read. Or just, to simply admire people and things around me. Sometimes, i meet interesting people too. Fellow Asean scholars (yes, there were many of us, from far and before.); college students; foreigners from the West; sons and fathers; mothers and daughters. Most of them made interesting conversations, and i was genuinely interested. In some subtle way, i was collecting stories, and at the same time writing my own (for stories are made up of people, and their stories too.)

Mm, maybe i should do a backpack-across-USA-on-the-railway at the end of NOC. Heh. We shall see.