The Delay

I booked a seat on a coach to Kuantan (from KL) Tuesday last (Transnasional) for 11.30 am schedule, but somehow there was no 11.30 coach. I was told that that particular coach was not available to make it for one reason or another, so the scheduled time shifted to 12.30 pm. Come to think of it was either for technical reason or for commercial reason that the 11.30 scheduled coach could not make the trip. Technical, maybe the coach broke down. Commercial, maybe there was not enough seats booked. It could be anything.

But I spent that extra 1 hour usefully, so I thought. I toured the bus station. Normal bus station, typically Malaysian I think, with many small shops selling variety of snacks to people waiting.


And there were these shop lots turned into left luggage offices. Good idea I thought.

And there were stalls selling ready cooked food, Malaysian style


(Malays especially). Not much variety though, the normal Malay stall food, rice and curry and fried fish, some vegetable etc etc. I did not fancy those.

But I stopped at a Chinese (non-Halal) stall where he was selling pork ribs and barbecued pork, and duck. Pretty interesting I thought.





Here are some picture of those. Being Muslim I do not take pork or meat not slaughtered the Muslim way. But don’t they look delicious?

I had my late morning snack at an Indian Muslim (they normally are in Malaysia) where I had fried egg noodle Mamak (Indian) style. Quite tasteless though.






But looking around the bus station, one can see the buildings under construction but seemed abandoned. Been like that for some years. I don’t really know what had happened, left abandoned like that!





Anyway it was time for me to board the coach, the time was close to 12.30 pm. Had to take some stairs down into the basement of the building where the coaches were waiting. And there were many coaches waiting. You have to be sure that you pick the right coach, and I observed some foreign persons asking around for the correct coach to their destination.




And the air pollution in that basement, I don’t really know what the air pollution reading over there was but you can smell the smoke………….the coaches engines were on. Luckily though the weather was kind, the days weather was quite cool, but imagine if it had been a hot (and humid, which is quite normal in Malaysia), it may be intolerable to wait for your coach in that basement coach boarding station. But Malaysians, being very tolerant…they never complain.

After that extra hour wait, the coach finally left for Kuantan at about 12.40 pm.