I went on a lovely 5-day holiday at Redang Island with some colleagues during the Hari Raya holidays couple of weeks ago, and apart from the long 10 hour drive there (no thanks to the extremely bad traffic jam once we hit the highway to Kuantan, due to the Hari Raya 'balik kampung' rush) and a rather strange experience with one of the island's local guides, I had an absolutely fantastic time. The strange experience with the local guide is a whole blog post by itself, so I'll save that for later.
As mentioned above, getting to the island from KL itself wasn't much fun. My boss arranged for us to meet up early Saturday morning at 1.30am and we would drive overnight to the island from KL. He had invited some colleagues from overseas offices (Japan and Thailand) and some of them had just arrived from the airport. Unfortunately one of their flights was delayed, so we ended up meeting and leaving only around 2.30am in the morning. Mind you, I was working on Friday too, and being the gung ho person that I am, I went for cell group on Friday night as well, and attempted to sleep at my friend's house for a couple of hours before leaving to meet my colleagues for the long drive. 'Attempt' is the key word here... wasn't really all that successful since my buddies were all yakking away in the living room where I was trying to crash... not that I blame them since I wasn't supposed to be crashing there in the first place.
So I only sorta slept for about a couple of hours before I met up with the rest of my group in the wee hours of the morning, some of which I had never met before that day, and I ended up driving the car first with 3 German guys from my Japan office in the car, and my boss driving his car with 4 others in it. Everything was smooth sailing on the highway up until we hit Kuantan. Then began the massive crawl for at least a couple of hours... and it was so bad that when I had to stop for the loo at a petrol station, I found that the queue to the ladies room was so long (and only ONE freakin' toilet!), I decided to pass and hope the next one would be better. Well, the next one was only better in that there were more toilets so the equally long queue moved a bit faster, I think. Still had to line up for at least 15 to 20 minutes. Dang.
After driving for bout 4 hours at least and getting through the jam, one of the German guys, his name is Michael, took over. I was wondering of German driving licenses are valid in Malaysia... wasn't too sure so I just crossed my fingers and hoped the police were on Hari Raya holidays too. Thankfully, no cops were in sight, which is especially good coz' we were far behind me bosses' car and worried that we wouldn't make it on time for the ferry to the island, so the German guy really stepped on it. And I mean, he REALLY stepped on it! Like he was going at 170 km/hr at one point, averaging around 150 unless there was a slow poke driver going at the speed limit of 110 in front of him. So early on I very politely told him that the speed limit on the highway is 110. Michael kinda grunted some form of acknowledgement that he heard what I said and continued driving at 150 average. All this time my colleague in my boss's car was constantly calling or sms-ing me asking me how far behind we were and how fast we were driving. One of my smses to her went something like this "We going at 170 now, and I'm praying very hard that we do not fly off the road". By the way, we were driving a Proton Gen 2. A wonderful home made Malaysian car. Anyone ever see those videos where some dudes tested a Proton against other good car brands by smashing them against something, and the Proton always ends up the most smashed. Yeah, memories of those vids didn't really help me at the time.
Eventually I kinda relaxed and stop twiddling my thumbs in the back seat. And after a few more hours (the sun had come up by then) we had to go off the highway and onto the trunk roads, where Michael swapped places with another German guy, Markus, and he took us on the final leg of our long drive through the small town roads, and fortunately I printed out a map of how to get to the jetty (or else we would've been lost without the guidance of my boss!) so once we hit Kuala Terengganu, we were able to find our way to the jetty soon enough and were off on a boat to Redang Island, totally ready for a real holiday to shake off the ordeal of the insane traffic jam and long drive.
Hmm... I babbled on quite a bit about just the whole adventure of getting there (getting back was much less of an adventure. Another one of my colleagues drove and he was so gung ho, he drove 7-8 hours, with breaks in between, til we reached KL and fortunately there was no jam. This was during the daytime though, so not so bad lah). Me thinks I will save the rest of my Redang Adventure for the next post. There will be pictures! Of fishes! Underwater! And my camera isn't waterproof! OOoooOOoo....
Stay tuned....
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