Braced for the balik kampung challenge

Passengers at KL Sentral waiting to board the buses and trains to get to their destination for Hari Raya.

A FRIEND arrived from London two days ago, enduring more than 13 hours of non-stop flight, painfully adjusting his body clock for the seven-hour time difference. He was in a car a few hours later heading for Kota Baru. It took him and his family almost 15 hours to reach “home”, more than the time spent on the plane.

Replicate the story all over the country. It is not surprising a two-and-a-half-hour trip to Ipoh becomes a nightmarish eight-hour crawl. The trip to Tangkak interchange from Kuala Lumpur, normally a two-hour journey, will take at least five hours on a bad day.