18 May 2010: The Return Journey

The last breakfast of our tour was to be something different. We had dim sum (RM33), ordering till we were full, before heading back to our room to check out. For the third time in as many days, we headed for Shahab Perdana, this time on our bikes. There were no day buses to Johor. It was easy to get a bus to KL though. Moreover, it was a weekday and tickets were not in hot demand.

We found ourselves on a bus (Konsortium Bas Ekspress Semenanjung) to KL (RM90 in total, RM14 for the bikes). Halfway through, we had to swap buses as our bus was heading to Pusat Bandar whereas we wanted to go to the temporary bus terminal at the Komplex Sukan Negera @ Bukit Jalil. Lunch was at a Konsortium depot (canteen) in Taiping.

We soon ran into a thunderstorm and it was going to be a really wet affair at Bukit Jalil. It was past 5pm and Dad sought shelter at some tents while I went about looking for tickets to Larkin. It was a simple affair. One of the guys marketing tickets for Super Nice got us the tickets to JB and even helped to load the bikes into the luggage compartment of our bus. We bought burgers to quell our hunger and past 6pm, the bus moved off, half empty.

We arrived in Seremban where most of the passengers alighted and the company waited more than half an hour in vain for passengers to JB. Business was bad. We left Seremban with just a few people onboard.

 

The delay in Seremban meant we were not going to reach home early. Mum and Bro were waiting at home. They had bought food from McDonald’s. When the bus stopped for dinner, we starved. The prices at the food centre was exorbitant. We bought some donuts which were finished quickly. I think we were just about the only people on the bus when it pulled into Larkin! A couple of others had alighted in Skudai.

It was damn late, already 11.30pm and I was desperate to get home. We assembled the bikes and fixed on the lights. I felt the motivation to up the pace as we sped towards Komplex Sultan Iskandar but Dad was probably too tired to ride faster. It was an amazing feeling to cross the border. Our long 1048km journey was finally coming to an end! It even felt weird to be on our roads. Traffic junctions halted our progress every few hundred meters, a steep contrast to the “never-ending” roads in Malaysia.

We reached home around 12.15am. Bro was already asleep but Mum was still awake. We felt really out of place in our own home! The whole place felt so spacious in comparison to the hotel rooms we had made to do with over the last 11 days. I was just glad to be home.

Money spent: RM208
Participants: LSH, Dad