RadioRoryThis is the welcome greeting of Singapore.
It’s actually on the travel documents they give you to fill out while you’re still on the plane.
I was about to learn something the hard way. No, not about drugs. It’s the fact that I wasn’t going to Singapore after all. Sure, that’s where my Scoot 787 Dreamliner was flying to, but I wouldn’t be staying there. I use several websites for finding places to stay, so there’s no point in throwing this particular HOTELS website under the bus. But when you search the HOTELS website looking for a room in Singapore, you generally expect that they’ll find something in the same country. Side note, see why there’s really no competition with those travel search engines.
When a search of the unnamed HOTELS website gave me a great rate, I moved fast to lock it down. I didn’t think twice about the fact that it was located in a place called Johor Bahru. I figured it was a neighborhood in Singapore like College Park is to Orlando or Galilee to Narragansett. No, Johor Bahru is a pretty big city and is the capital of the Johor State of Malaysia. Yup, I was staying in a whole different country.
I was about to get a crash course in making the crazy border crossing between the two counties that are connected by a very busy causeway. There’s no way I would have made it if not for the help of a lovely young woman who was going home to Johor Bahru (JB as it’s known) on a study break from university in Sydney.
Here’s the deal: after getting through Singapore Customs at the airport, you take a bus to the border checkpoint (a good 30 minutes) to leave the country you just entered. You get off the bus while it gets into its own line to be screened before crossing into Malaysia. With bags in tow, you rush the passport control line (with hundreds of others) hoping that you get processed out of Singapore and down through the maze of escalators to reach your same bus before it continues the border crossing with or without you. You then take the short ride over the causeway to the immigration building in JB where you go through the same dance all over again to be allowed to enter Malaysia. Waiting at that end is a giant mall and transit station because many people in Singapore cross the border for cheaper shopping in JB. Many people live in Malaysia because they can’t afford Singapore’s high rent and amazingly they make this trip every day.
Lines are so bad during the rush, people simply get off of the bus while it’s stuck in causeway traffic and walk the half-mile to the immigration building for processing and pick up another bus from there.
So it’s time to make lemonade. My hotel was bought and paid for (and it included a good breakfast buffet too). But I would have to make this crossing twice each day in order to see the sites of Singapore. That included passing through a Customs building that looked like it kept SkyNet in the basement.
Nothing worthwhile is ever easy.