TANKS Travel Tales - a travelogue.......

Malaysia's KTM is currently the only service provider that runs regular trains between Johor Bahru in Malaysia and Woodlands in Singapore . Nothing spectacular or amazing, I personally consider this as just a regular inter-city train connection between Peninsular Malaysia 's southern most city of Johor Bahru ( JB ) with Singapore's northern region of Woodlands. The only difference between typical inter-city trains and this service, is that this train service actually crosses an international border between two countries even though the actual journey each way is less than 5 minutes. Therefore, passports and travel documents are required for immigration and customs clearance purposes. Named the  KTM Shuttle Tebrau , this train service is highly subsidised when tickets are purchased in Malaysia at JB Sentral Station's Ticket Counters . Return tickets from JB to Singapore generally cost only RM5 at the time of the publishing of this blog article.  Buying the tickets in...

Johor Bahru (JB) is located at the southern tip of Peninsular Malaysia and is connected to Singapore via the Causeway , across the Straits of Johor. Due to its close geographical proximity to Singapore, as well as the favourable currency exchange rate between the Singapore Dollar (SGD) and the Malaysian Ringgit (RM), many Singaporeans and Malaysians working in Singapore, typically made day trips to JB via the Causeway. During these day trips, most travelers will dine and shop. It is not uncommon to see folks returning to Singapore from, JB in the late afternoons and evenings, laden with shopping bags. This happens on most days, not just the weekends. Although during weekends, the crowds crossing the Causeway are noticeably larger. Being someone who does not really enjoy being in a crowd, I mostly stay away from such day trips. On occasions when I drove across the Causeway, it was mostly to travel further inland into Malaysia, either to Kuala Lumpur or to Ipoh. But on one weekday after...