Kuala Lumpur to Cameron Highlands - Bus

For this bus journey, the initial plan was to just buy our tickets on the day. However a couple of days before we planned to leave I looked on easybook.com to see only a few times for departures on Saturday. The only one going late morning was with CS Travel with only a few tickets left for the 11.30am bus. I decided to book them online for 35RM each.

I'm sure more buses are available on weekdays.

With unpredictable traffic in KL, we decided to get the monorail and KLIA transit back to TBS-  bus station from Chinatown. This was quick and easy to use.

We later found out that this weekend was the start of a weeks national holiday for Malaysians. Therefore the bus station was heaving! Luckily they have several desks for e-ticket collection for any bus company which was quick. I did notice that the queue to buy tickets was huge and would of taken well over half an hour. 

Ticket collection desk very quick

After this, we went to our gate and waited until our bus arrived. It pulled in on time and everyone boarded and we set off for the Cameron Highlands. I have to say that TBS is a great bus station that is efficient and works very well. By far the best one we've come across on our travels in South East Asia.

The CS bus was quite nice inside with 2+1 seats that were big and comfy. They also played an English film however we were sitting at the back so it wasn't too easy to see.

They seem to have a very strict policy of no food and drink on board, only water. Make sure you put any in your bags if you want to sneak some on otherwise you'll have to throw it away. After 30 minutes, the driver actually pulled over to stop someone eating and made him take it off the bus. I don't know whether he had to throw away a bag full of food or put it underneath the bus. It all seemed very over the top, we managed to sneakily eat some chocolate!

CS Travel bus

The journey itself was very long as it was the national holiday and loads of traffic. We left at 11.30am and didn't arrive in Tanah Rata until 6pm; it was meant to only take 3.5 hours. We stopped once for food around 3pm after the driver tried to take a short cut down some housing areas. I think he misjudged the size of his bus and we ended up back where we started 25 minutes later.

The final 50km is windy on some narrow roads and takes nearly 2 hours. I was feeling quite light headed by the time we got there. Oh well we finally made it!

2 out of 5