The Bus trip to KL

My bus ticket stated 11am, Tuesday morning. As usual, Dad drove me there by 10.20am. Before I could walk to the counter, Dad suggested I ask the bus driver. I handed him the ticket and he said it was the right bus. I was on seat 7C, and there was a girl sitting by the window on 7D. The bus was old and had tattered headrests. There were many empty seats, which were to be filled by passengers from the other towns along the route.

As the bus started on its journey, I started talking to the girl sitting next to me. She was on her way to KL for her uni project. She was studying in UM to be a town planner. Shazliana (I think that was her name) told me I could call her by her nickname, 'Baby' -- err, I don't think so. That wasn't the worst part. The worst part was hearing her say that she needed to talk to people on the bus or she would get motion sickness. I couldn't tell her that just by looking at her to speak, made me feel nauseous. So I tried looking out the window while speaking to her. It helped a little, but I prefer pretending to sleep.

Further along our conversation, I found out that I was on the 10:35am bus - I suppose they did that "Let's mock the time on the tickets" routine again. You'd think that would have made me arrive earlier to my destination. Alas! That was not to be. At the first rest stop (as usual, had sandwiches from home - I never buy any food from these stops), the bus took around 15 passengers from another Transnasional bus that had broken down nearby. I overheard the bus driver saying that he would drop them at the Kuantan bus terminal. Kuantan was out of the way and Shazliana started to fret that it would waste a lot of time. Kuantan was out of the way and was not part of the route. The bus arrived in Kuantan around 2pm. The stranded passengers had disembarked from the bus and were taking their things from the luggage compartment. Twenty minutes later, some of these passengers got on the bus again, bound for Kuala Lumpur! Why couldn't the few stranded passengers who were not headed for Kuala Lumpur be left at the rest stop for the next bus, while our bus continued our journey? Why couldn't Transnasional send in a replacement bus for the stranded passengers? Grrr!!

We made it to Kuala Lumpur in one piece by 6:40pm. My uncle was already waiting for me at the bus terminal, and I suggested that I buy my bus ticket back then and there after asking him when would be the most convenient time for him to send me to the terminal. He did want to think about it first, but I told him that it would be more convenient to buy it while I was at the terminal. We went to the counter and enquired about the tickets available for the 1st (as suggested by my father, a quick trip without hassling anyone for too long). The woman at the counter rattled off some times, starting with 9am. My uncle happily told her I would get on the 9am bus.

*** To Be Continued In Next Another Post ***