We went to Sepang, and returned significantly tanned

Note to self: next time, remember the sun tan lotion.

Quite an adventurous trip, it was. We were supposed to meet the rest of the cohort at Orchard at 7 am on the Saturday morning, with the bus to depart at 7:30. We reached home on Friday night (Sat morning acherly) at 3 am, late and high. Knowing that I wouldn't be able to wake up on time if I slept now, I decided I would stay awake until 7:30 and sleep later on the bus.

3:00 am to 3:30 am - American idol rerun on TV
3:30 am to 4:00 am - Surf Engadget.com and about a hundred useless articles on the BBC site
4:00 am to 4:30 am - Days of our Lives on TV
4:30 am - I decide staying awake is madness and trudge off to the bedroom, set the alarm and collapse on the bed.

Naturally we overslept. At 7:30 am, my phone rang - “Hi, is that K? I’m Ricky here, the trip organiser. Are you guys coming?” What a way to wake up on a Saturday, more so when you’re hung over, and sleptunder. Fortunately, I had anticipated that we would oversleep and had packed our bags the previous night. All we had to do was comb our teeth and brush our hair, pick up the bags, and RUN.

I called Ricky back, “Hi Ricky, this is K, it looks like we won’t be there on time (hehehe). Can we meet you guys directly at Tuas at 8:15?”. Tuas is the checkpoint between Singapore and Malaysia, and is about 40 minutes away from home by taxi. We ran downstairs, took a nice white Mercedes cab, told the driver to hurry scurry, and crashed back into sleep.

As it turned out, we reached Tuas a minute before the bus got there. Paid off the cab, and were about over to the main building when we were suddenly accosted by a serious looking policeman carrying a serious looking AK-47. “Donchew know you’re not allowed to walk here? Pedestrians are not allowed in this complex!”.

“Ah pardon me sir, I didn’ch know, but if you could just let us walk 20 metres more, we will give a convincing impression of having alighted from that orange bus that’s just pulled up there”.

Naturally, the cop didn’t have a sense of humour, but Ricky came to the rescue. His keen eyes had spotted us from the bus and he jogged over and explained the situation to the cop. After a dressing down (“Don’ch do that again hor!”), we walked over to the counter, successfully negotiated the immigration officers and gratefully clambered on the bus. Phew!

It was 9 am, we hadn’t left Singapore yet, and what an adventure.

Five minutes later, we crossed the causeway, and pulled up at the Malaysian checkpoint. This was painless and we were soon on our way. By now we were accompanied by a guide, Roger, who exprained to us what we would do on our way to Subang: “In one hour we will stop at Yong Peng, where you hungry people can grab a quick bite. Twenty minit oni ah.”.

Yong Peng café – the name conjured up visions of fresh hot steaming roti pratas with nice chicken curry (this is Malaysia after all), and our tummies started rumbling in pleasure and anticipation. But when we pulled up at YP, our dreams were cruelly shattered; we encountered stall upon stall serving nothing but rice with ‘ikan bilis’ (anchovies) infested vegetables, noodles etc etc. We were quite disappointed, but somehow found something to take the edge off our hunger - nasi lemak and some non-infested vegetables. So much for being seasoned travellers – we couldn’t find anything decent at a rest stop. The good part was we found clean loos and had coffee and tea.

Back on the bus. I’m a lousy bus traveller, and can’t sleep at all on buses. You might recall we hadn’t slept much the previous night, so I was quite out of it. Sa had no such problems – she curled into a comfortable position and drifted off.