Storyline: Home to home westward
It was surprisingly easy to travel by bus in Malaysia. If you remember, we arrived in Malacca, our first destination on Malaysia, by bus from Singapore.The bus driver dropped us off in front of our hotel. Next day we walked all the way to the bus station that is quite out of the old city centre. One can easily book bus tickets online, however being new to the region and knowing nothing about their services we preferred to talk to a clerk, see the buses by ourselves and then decide on our best option. A bus ride from Malacca to Kuala Lumpur (KL), our next stop, is about 2 to 2½ hours.
The bus terminal was well-serviced. We took a number as in many places where there is a queue. The number would show on the board to indicate kiosk one had to go to for service. So, when it was our turn, we spoke to a nice lady who showed us the schedule for all buses from Malacca to KL. She also recommended a few companies and we chose one that best fit our schedule and available seats. We booked front seats and were ready for our next leg in Malaysia.
It was an express bus and would take us to KL in about 2 hours. The bus station was clean and had a variety of stores, cafés and food kiosks. It is recommended to arrive 30 min before the bus departure. In the day of our departure we took a Grab car (the equivalent to Uber in the western world) to the terminal.
Only passengers with tickets are allowed into the departure hall. One has to scan their ticket to get in. When our bus was ready for boarding, we simply scanned our ticket out and off we went to check our luggage.
The bus company we used was KKKL Express. The bus was clean and spacious with reclining seats and footrests.
Most, if not all, intercity buses in KL stop and at and depart from the TBS (Terminal Bersepadu Selatan). This is the biggest bus terminal I have ever seen. Arriving at that terminal gives an impression of being at an airport.
It is integrated with BTS (Bandar Tasik Selatan station), which is the train interchange station for four train transit lines. BTS and TBS form an intermodal transportation hub, with all amenities for the passengers, such as shopping and dining areas, ATMs, baby care rooms, luggage storage, his and hers prayer rooms, etc.
We will have a separate post about the great public transportation in all big cities we visited during our 3 months, and the woeful state of it in Canadian cities. KL’s public transit network is very impressive, and we used it heavily during our stay there. We returned to TBS, approximately 10km for the KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre), to buy our tickets to Penang.
Although the terminal is big, it was easy to navigate and find our way to a clerk who could help us chose our next bus company and departure time. The terminal is said to have 60 bus platforms. There are about 40 ticketing counters with staff and many ticket vending machines. According to some stats the terminal serves over 50,000 passengers daily. Impressive! We took rail transit to the bus terminal on our departure date, scanned our tickets into our departure hall, which as in Malacca was only accessible to ticket holders, and waited to be scanned out to the bus platform.
It was a 4.5 hours bus ride to Penang. We had chosen the same bus company we had used to get to KL since we already knew their service. There was a half-hour refreshment stop in the middle.
The bus we took goes to the island. Its first stop was at Butterworth on the mainland. One can actually get off there and take a 30 min ferry ride to George Town city centre.
However, we were not sure if this would be close enough to our hotel, nor had we checked the ferry schedule. Our tickets were to the final stop at Sungai Nibong bus terminal, Penang, from where, if you remember our George Town post, we took another Grab car to the hotel.
We were also impressed by the great condition of the Malaysian highways the buses took us on. Very clean (couldn’t spot a plastic cup or any garbage, just nicely trimmed flowers and shrubs), well maintained, and although we were there during a busy time of Ramadan, traffic was not as bad as we know it in Canada.
In our KL post we will talk more about the extensive range of public transport networks, including a free bus route.
What I want to stress in this post is that it is very easy to travel comfortably and inexpensively using public transport throughout the country.
You can buy your tickets online or at a bus/train station. Two sites we used (there are many more) for our references are:
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