Transtar Travel – silverfox175

Not so long ago Maureen & I planned a visit to Singapore to meet up with other Old Conways for a ‘Conway’ reunion. The reunion was mainly attended by those living in the Australasia area.

I looked at the various airlines and their prices and decided on our old favourite (which was our favourite at that time) Malaysian Airlines, which would require us to transit Kuala Lumpur, but we were on holiday and getting to a destination is half the fun..
We could have stayed at the airport and transited KL later that night to Singapore, but as we hate night flying we decided to stay a couple of nights in KL before carrying on to Singapore.

I’d always wanted to do the train journey from KL to Singapore, but when I looked at the schedule the journey would have taken over seven hours. I considered this to be far too long for such a short trip, knowing that from KL to Malacca was only a two-hour drive and that Singaporean tourists would drive from Singapore to Malacca for a weekend break, so I decided to investigate a road trip, which would only take five hours.

There are several coach companies that run the five-hour trip from KL to Singapore, so after checking out a number of them  I decided to book us in Solitaire class with Transtar Travel, which is a Singapore listed bus company. If the transit time was correct at five hours, then using the bus would be quicker than flying. Our hotel in KL was nearly an hour’s drive from the airport. We were expected to check-in two hours before take- off, followed by just over an hour’s flight. Then we would wait for our bags, clear customs & immigration and finally take a taxi to our Singapore hotel. The bus would be faster! When I made our booking over the internet I was asked to pick our meals! We had a choice of four types of meal, and our choice would be served during the trip.

We left our hotel after breakfast and a short taxi ride saw us at the terminus for the Singapore destined bus. The terminus was not a giant place with hundreds of people jostling for space, but a side room of the travel agent.