So being the cheapos that we are, we decided to take a bus from Singapore to Malaysia. Actually there were several reasons we didn’t want to take a flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur.
1. We want to see the scenery of the country, instead of just flying in and out of major cities.
2. Flying in and out takes more time than expected due to checking in time, etc.
3. We have all of the time in the world (except when money runs out) so we’ll take it slow and travel north in our own time.
So from Singapore, we took the Red MRT (train) line to Kranji. There, I exchanged my SGD to Ringget (RM) as I had been advised against money changers in Malaysia – apparently counterfeits are all around.
We then crossed the road via the pedestrian bridge to catch the Number 170 bus (you can get the No. 160 too) – these buses are so frequent! There was probably about 5 minutes between them at the time we were there – 3pm. We had looked up the early morning timetable and buses were at 15 minute intervals, so pretty frequent all day, plus it was a Sunday.
We boarded, traveled for about 5 minutes, then everyone swiped off with their EZ Link card (it will read ‘Ride Suspended’ on the machine) and we followed the crowd up to the Woodlands Checkpoint. Here, they looked through our passports, stamped, and off we went again, to follow the small, but rushing crowd back onto the No. 170 bus.
The crowd was pretty vicious, small, but determined to get back onto the bus and resume their seats. We didn’t get back onto the same bus (I tried to memorise who our bus driver was) but we did follow a woman I recognized from our last trip. Here, we swiped back on (‘Ride Resumed’ will pop up), then traveled across the bridge into Malaysia.
A short journey later (literally, just minutes) and then everyone filed out of the bus again (‘Ride Suspended’) to go up to immigration in Malaysia. Got our passports stamped, didn’t need a visa to get in (we only checked this out last night!) so Swiss and Aussies won’t need a visa.
