Journey Abroad
(1956)

I HAVE just come back to England after two years in Malaya, I lived in an R.A.F. camp in the Island of Singapore, which is just north of the Equator.

One day, with my father and mother, I set out by car for a holiday. We were going to Fraser's Hill, over three hundred miles from Singapore, and 4.011 feet above sea level.

On the way to Kuala Lumpur, we had to cross two broad rivers by ferties which were pushed across by a motor boat tied alongside the ferry. I remember one particular incident; we were waiting for a ferry to take us across and had stopped outside a Balayan eating house, when a malay came up to us and told us we had a puncture. Can you imagine changing a tyre with a temperature of 100°F. ? We stopped for the night in an hotel in Kuala Lumpur. The next day we had some excitement. There was a security check by soldiers to stop food being taken in cars to the terrorists. Cars of the local population were searched but the Europeans were only asked if they were carrying food.

At times we passed convoys of lorries guarded by armoured cars, in case of attack by the terrorists. In places in the jungle we passed through, we saw luxuriant purple flowers and bushes, but could not pick them because of the huge red ants and poisonous snakes.

When we got to the bottom of Fraser's Hill, we had still to motor over twenty-five miles of twisting and turning road, bordered on either side by the jungle and sometimes on one side by a drop of hundreds of feet into deep ravines.

At Fraser's Hill the houses are built just like the houses in England. At night log fires are lit, and you have blankets on the bed : what a change this is from the heat of Singapore ! Here we were able to stroll down paths through the jungle where trees were so tall and dense that no sunlight penetrated them. However, there were disadvantages to life on the doorstep of the jungle—one day, for instance, daddy had to burn a leech from my leg with a cigarette.

As we left Fraser's Hill our car was followed by several huge apes which lived in the trees. We heard their cries for some time, though the animals did not leave the trees. It was an appropriate ending to an exciting holiday.