Kota Bharu, Malaysia, Asia

Today was a very long day of travelling by bus. Ana and I left the hostel at 10am to catch our bus over to Kuala Terengganu at 10:30am. The bus wasn’t quite as nice as the one I took from Singapore, but it was still pretty decent. Big seats, just not as clean and such a weird “schedule”.

We were told that we should get to Kuala Terengganu at about 5pm, which would have been perfect timing to see what was there and then head out to Kota Bharu. We ended up leaving KL at 11am and then made a stop at 12pm. I was happy to see that we stopped outside a filling station that had a Dunkin Donuts in it, so I was able to get a little slice of home while we waited. I had not anticipated that we would be waiting there for an hour and fifteen minutes! The drivers didn’t speak any English so we had no idea why we were stopped, but finally we hit the road at 1:15pm. We were only about 45 minutes outside of KL!

We then drove at about 15kph for nearly an hour, for no explainable reason. That was fun. We ended up driving for about 5.5 hours before making another stop on the side of the road in some random little town. We figured this one must just be a bathroom break because we just saw a sign saying we were only 95km (60 miles) from Kuala Terengganu. We were wrong. We sat there for about an hour as the drivers had a full sit down meal and a few drinks while chatting with the restaurant owner, who is probably his cousin.

We finally hit the road and it took another hour and a half to get to our destination. We saw the Floating Mosque and we drove passed, but unfortunately never had time to make it back there for a visit. We got into Kuala Terengganu at 7:30pm and had to catch the only other bus going up to Kota Bharu, which was at 8pm. We shoveled some rice and noodles down and caught our next bus for another 3 hours.

Luckily when we got up to KB we found a hostel right next to the bus station and got a cheap room there. It was not bad, as far as hostels go. A couple of decent sized beds, our own bathroom and shower (with hot water) and a tv (which didn’t get any channels at all. We took a short walk out to a local market which was surprisingly busy for 11pm on a Wednesday night. There wasn’t really much there for us except for a couple of cool drinks and a lot of attention from the locals. I didn’t see any other westerners while walking around, so everyone made sure they had a good look.

Back to the hostel now and another day of travelling tomorrow, but hopefully much shorter. Perhentian Islands, here we come!!