Jungle Train & travels

Leaving Taman Negara I was bound for Jerantut, one of the stops on the infamous jungle train. The train went straight through the heart of Malaysia and was suppose to be a wonderful view and ride through the jungle. So i decided why not, it wasn't the easiest way to get to Thailand or the safest but it seemed intriguing. My bus arrived at 11:30am to Jerantut, I panicked a bit because I thought the train left at noon and I still hadn't gotten a ticket. Lucky for me, trains in SE Asia are notorious for running late. This one wasn't leaving until 6:30pm that night so I had plenty of time. Unlucky for me this town was pretty dirty and boring and since it was Ramadan, a lot of places were closed. I ran into a guy. Lee, who I had met while hiking in the jungle the day before. We were both going to Krabi, Thailand and decided to go together bc the border crossing is pretty dangerous on the east side. It is heavily patrolled by the Thai military and shootings and bombings occur quite frequently due to Malay Muslims battling for autonomy from the Thai Buddhists. Anyhow, We were able to meet up and ended up spending the next 2 days together trying to get to Krabi. We departed the jungle train at 3:30am into a sea of taxi drivers all charging 5x the price it would normally charge. Its not a matter of the money ($4 vs $.50) but a matter of principle so we decided not to go and sleep at the train station until the sun came up and the border opened. That lasted for about 5 minutes before the mosquitos started eating us alive. Next paln of attack, hitch hike into town and try and find an open hostel. No dice. We did find a food stall that was open who gave us a ride into town so we decided to go with that, but the whole town was dead, not a light on and no where which looked open at 4am. So we went to the one place that was open to wait out the sun and the opening of the border, McDonald's. So after spending a sleepless night on the jungle train I found myself in McDonald's, a rather busy one at that too.

After waiting for a few hours we finally decide to take a taxi to the border and cross over. The sun was rising as we walked over the bridge into what seemed to be a ghost town. We finally made it to a hotel to try and ask how to get to Hat Yai but no luck, After wandering around aimlessly for about half an hour we found a minibus that was headed our way! 4 hours later we arrive in Hat Yai just in time to try and find another minibus to Krabi. We both did some price checking to make sure we wern't getting screwed and ended up in an air-conditioned mini bus all to ourselves. We kind of looked at each other and were really excited, but it was too good to be true. 15 min later we were moved to a different minibus packed full of people and lucky us, we got the back to ourselves. Thing is it was maybe one and a half seats and the luggage was hovering over us so it was going to make for a very long 6 hours. Oh and there was a DVD on playing some kind of Thai Justin Timberlake/Cheech & Chong/an  adolescent named Gumby and some drag queens. Apparently thew mini bus got the box set of the concert because we had uninterrupted 7 hours of pure Thai entertainment. It was horrible. Eventually we made it to Krabi and couldn't have been happier. That's where I met Bob.