Day 5: Port Dickson to Home

Distance: <330km
Time: 7hrs
Stops: 5 stops
lessons learnt:
1) Route 5 is a horrible ride.
2) My maximum threshold for riding in difficult circumstances is about 5 hours. Then it becomes torturous.
5) I ride hunched over and tensed up like I am doing 230km/h around knee-down curves. I am doing a max of 80km/h. I need to improve my posture.

So I watched the sunset last night

sunset at avillion admiral cove

then had a lovely sleep with the balcony doors open and just the fan on. I was high up enough not to have to worry about mosquitoes. Woke up at 0730 to this

daybreak over the marina

and was on the road by 0900, after savoring my last hotel buffet breakfast PT local delights. Today it was nasi goreng kampung and capati with dhal.

I've decided to head home. Partly because there's nowhere feasible to stop between here and home unless I took an interior route and tried to stay on the edge of Taman Negara. Was not too impressed by the hotel selections, so gave it a pass.

Decided to take Route 5 all the way from Port Dickson to Pontian, then get on the Gelang Patah road with a short stretch (10 minutes) on the Tuas Link highway. I'd always wanted to see the quaint little towns along Route 5 by bike, we'd done it once as a family by car.

Later on, I realized there were a few problems with that. Firstly, the quaint little towns I remembered were along Route 1. Secondly, Route 5 is a horrible, horrible ride.

I got out of PD easy enough, with a quick stop for petrol. Followed the signs for Melaka, and pretty soon was stuck behind a long convoy of slow-moving vehicles. I took the opportunity to get ahead of what I could at traffic lights, but there was always more waiting for me up ahead. What made it worse were the cars behind, tailgating and insisting to overtake although it wouldn't get them anywhere. I let them all pass, and when we finally got to Melaka, we were still within touching distance.

In Melaka, I took the new road along the coast which had new unoccupied buildings on the left and more land reclamation going on on the right. They need to stop soon, or we'll shortly be part of Sumatra. It was straight and empty but with about 5 traffic lights beautifully sequenced, which by Malaysian standards mean that if you are traveling at the speed limit, you will have to stop at every one of them.

Followed the signs first to "Pusat Bandaraya", then to "Muar", which I knew to be in the right direction. True to form, the signs for Muar disappeared just when I had to make a turn, but I recognized "Lebuhraya AMJ", mad a right turn where it counted and the Muar signs showed up again soon after.

So I ended up on the AMJ highway, a straight, dull, two-lane dual carriageway. Fairly boring, and took me away from my meandering routes, but after the snail's crawl to Melaka I was glad for it. It was a straight shot to Muar, and I made a brief stop in between.

Got to Muar and started following the signs for "Batu Pahat". Still doing ok and hadn't needed the map yet. Unfortunately, I had to pass another 11 perfectly sequenced traffic lights in Muar before making a left at the t-junction. How do I know there were 11? They'd numbered the damned things.

pointing toward home

A few more traffic lights and one detour for fuel later (I had to detour, I had not seen a petrol station since leaving Melaka), it was country roads again, which were nice for a while and then I caught up with the next convoy and had a slow, hot ride to Batu Pahat.

Another maze of traffic lights, following the signs to Pontian. And a slow crawl to Pontian. Are you starting to get the idea?

In Pontian, at one of the traffic stops, I moved to the head of the line, stopped, looked down and realized I was stopped in a puddle of something slick. It was oil of some kind. Sure enough, as I moved off, the bike started to slide under me. I was lucky it was a stop and no a green light where I would have rode straight through. Stopped when I could to check. But most of it had already rubbed off. I was still very careful round corners after that, just in case. Bike wash tomorrow.

More traffic lights, following signs to Johor Bahru and then the green signs to Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur. Slow crawl to the highway, opened up to 100km/h for about 10 minutes, and I am home. The last 10 minutes was the best part of the ride.

So the final verdict on Route 5: simply not worth doing. Too much traffic, too many traffic lights, and uninteresting scenery. There were some stretches with a motorcycle lane that came in useful getting past long lines of vehicles, but the motorcycle lane is just a couple of extra lines drawn on the left side of the road. It passes a lot of intersections on the left, so a car from the right turning into you or a vehicle coming out of one of those intersections into your path are very real dangers.

So, there ends my first solo multi-day trip. Or trip of any kind, really. Rode for the best part of 5 days covering 1,242kms. An experience I will remember, and will replicate, maybe with friends, maybe with fellow open road enthusiasts, maybe one day with my kids.

It was great being completely detached from the world. I replied to a few Whatsapp messages and finally caved in and checked Facebook over the last two days. But no e-mails, and the only person I texted regularly was my wife. I hardly spoke to anyone other than myself, except to check in and checkout of hotels and to order food and drink. I am a true hermit in the making.

As I sit writing this my dog is having a good snuffle at my bike and me. I must have picked up a lot of interesting scents along the way. Come to think of it, there were more than a few times I passed through places and all I could smell was food.

I am now waiting for the family to get back from school, they will be pleasantly surprised, I am sure, and I will be happy to be with them again.

There may be a few addendums to this from my regular short Sunday rides, but I don't know.

We'll see.

Thanks for reading.