Avoiding The Tourists In Tenom
A train trip back in time
I visited the island of Borneo in the early 1990s, as part of a holiday to Singapore and Malaysia.
We’d already spent a few days in Sarawak and had moved to the other Malaysian state on the island, Sabah.
Our hotel, the Tanjung Aru (part of the Shangri-La chain), was just outside the state capital, Kota Kinabalu, and it was pretty luxurious.
We did the usual touristy things, like a visit around the town, but it was our trip inland that really showed us something you seldom get to see on this type of holiday.
We’d booked a day out to the small town of Tenom, which is about 90 miles south-west of Kota Kinabalu (in the direction of Brunei).
It’s well away from the usual haunts of tourists, and even though my wife was feeling a bit off-colour that day, we decided we’d go anyway.
As luck would have it, because we preferred not to have to engage with fellow travellers, we were the only two on that excursion.
Our guide for the day picked us up in a car and drove us to the nearby railway station, whence we began a journey unlike anything we’d ever taken before.
When we got on the train, the first thing you couldn’t help but notice was that it looked more like two or…
