I just like to say that the myth about Malaysian divers being speed demons is not accurate at all. Compared to Singapore drivers they're not that much different.
Very early Saturday morning we took a cab from my home to Woodlands Checkpoint. Cab driver had the insane notion that we were late for our flight so we traveled at 120km/h all the way to Woodlands. Suddenly I no longer felt worried about dying in an accident in an express coach in the middle of some Malaysian highway. BKE seems perfectly adequate at that moment.
Once I got to Larkin Bus Terminal, the only express coach available was an hour and a half later despite the fact that there was at least eight bus companies servicing the route we were taking and each one had a bus leaving every hour. We can't go shopping since it was too early for most of sane shopkeepers to hawk their wares. Except for one selling kids toys. And he was actually making sales. Kids have no sense of temporal propriety when begging for new toys from parents. Eight in the morning, want to buy toy oredi.
Once we boarded our express coach and got on the highway I was reassured that most Malaysian drivers have more sense than some Singapore drivers. In Singapore, some local drivers use the posted speed limits as half of the actual speed that normal traffic should be moving at. These drivers normally sport those blue thingies at the top of the cars labelled "TAXI", It's the local patois for "Crazy Speed Demons". Unfortunately not all of these deranged species of Singapore drivers are so easily identified. In Malaysia however, It was reassuring to find that most non-commercial vehicles would take the speed limit and add 6okm/h to get the actual safe driving speeds. It was comforting to find that my coach was travelling at roughly 100km/h on rain-soaked highway that has dangerous crosswinds, overtaking a trailer laden with logs who was travelling at roughly 90km/h. No wonder I got so much sleep on that journey, I was exhausted from all that nail biting.
Once I got to Muar the bloody "mangkuk" of a bus driver refused to stop at the normal bus terminal since it was completing it's journey at Tangkak and considered that it was too troublesome for it to make 2 U-turns just to drop off the few passengers that wanted to get off at Muar. We had to lug our luggage across a main road across some back-alleys and an overhead bridge that had a stair-climber champion as its architect. The vertical height between each steps was so steep I thought I undergoing martial arts training. As it turned out, out of the 40 passengers on the bus, only 2 stayed on the bus to Tangkak. Service Excellence - Malaysian Express Coach Style.
From the terminal we got a cab to my kampung, a 15 to 20 minute ride, a time span not possible for the safety conscious once you consider the actual distance. Pretty much like the last time I went back for a wedding, I got a beat-up cab much like those you see in those Hollywood movies set in Latin American towns. You haggle a little over the price and you're off. Air conditioning was of-course optional. Once I got in I realised that all cabs in that town was low-riding, and that seat-belts are just for show, nobody in a cab uses them. As much as I thought that noisy, sputtering machine was going to quit while we on the incline of the bridge over the Muar river, it actually managed to crawl up to a decent speed 120km/h. I guess the speedometer then broke down cos the needle didn't come back down until we alighted. We were taking left turns at traffic junctions at roughly 80km/h without shifting down. I'm pretty sure the driver had one hand on the window sill throughout the whole ride.
Nothing else about Malaysian drivers until I took the return coach to Larkin of course. That guy was actually very practical. He stayed at his bus sticker speed of 90km/h half of the way until it started to rain. It poured so heavily that we almost couldn't see the heavy trailer in front of us. All we could see was white sheets of rain falling. The driver thought the weather was terrible and decided to get out from under it as soon as possible. He sped up to about 120km/h, stayed in the right lane all the way until we outran the rain even though he could only make out vehicles in front by sheer instinct. The left half of the coach's front windscreen was cracked in the corner. By the end of the journey the crack had travelled to the center of the windscreen. I was kissing the tarmac when we got off that coach.
Okay so I was being a little melodramatic in my descriptions and one has to admit that Malaysians have greater distances to cover when travelling so driving at slightly higher speeds comes as second nature to them. They do want to get to their destinations before the next "Hari Raya" you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment