A Traveller's Tale

We didn't just drive back to Singapore any old how yesterday. No, we had a cunning plan - which failed on an epic scale.

The scheme was to set off much later than we normally would, after the maghrib prayer. Thus we would escape the inevitable jam at Tuas with everyone coming back after the long weekend, and the slow traffic on the highway, by arriving at Immigration very late at night when the jam had long since dissolved. Unfortunately it appeared that everyone else coming back after the weekend had the same idea. We arrived at Tuas to witness the sea of red brake-lights lapping well beyond the final toll booth on the highway. I reckoned we'd be lucky to get back to Hall by 2.30 am.

And here's the odd thing. Having realised just how bad the jam was even before we ritually filled up with the cheaper petrol available that side of the Causeway, I felt a strange kind of fatalistic resignation such that I wasn't massively upset. I don't know if this atypical indifference played any part in what ensued, but we actually made pretty reasonable progress towards the Malaysian Immigration, assisted by several slices of luck and some fairly impudent manoeuvring. Usually we have simply found ourselves stationary for anything up to fifteen minutes at a time when we've been in this kind of jam at this location. That just didn't happen; not to us, anyway.

So the upshot of all this was that we were able to celebrate our arrival back at the old doorstep before 12.40 am. Not exactly optimal, but a lot earlier than predicted at one stage.

Think we may abandon the cunning planning though.