Transborneo Bus

I've been using the bus for quite some time now so now I'm just gonna blog about it just cause. So I usually get to use Vital Focus Transportation's PB Bus and sometimes the MTC Bus service for the trans-Borneo trip between Kampua Town and Oil Town (yeah yeah I forgot to take snapshots of those buses for this post, so sue me).

A bustling bus station in the morning. The bus flights can be as earliest as 6am. With the introduction of the new Airbus A880 model and the cheapness of diesel in this country, now everyone can fly.

A typical scene at a bus terminal where the passengers wait for their flight while families, friends and spouses wait eagerly for their loved ones.

You can say I'm a frequent flyer/busser since the gap between Oil Town and Kampua Town is only 7 hours (bus standard, 4 hours by car, may vary depending on the frequency of rest stops and technical difficulties), so I'll just head back to unwind during free weeks, semester breaks or whenever I feel like I'm close to the edge. The fare is only RM40, 1/4 of the price of using commercial airliners. There's no on-board food and toilet of course (though that would be nice), but you can buy supplies and take a leak at the different stops along the bus's scenic but boring route:

For a Miri-Sibu and vice versa trip, the bus will stop at 3 locations (in order of appearance): Niah, Bintulu and Selangau. Miri-Niah takes 2 hours, Niah-Bintulu another 2 hours, Bintulu-Selangau 2 hours again and Selangau-Sibu only takes 1 hour. For Miri-Kuching trips, it takes an incredible 14 hours but luckily I stay at Kampua Town which is in between those two cities.

Apart from the mentioned stops where the driver will give the passengers 30-15 minutes of break, the bus will sometimes give a pleasantly surprise stop by the roadside in the middle of nowhere to allow the passengers to admire the beauty of Sarawak's forest while the driver and his co-driver do some emergency maintenance on the dead fuming engine.

The new A880 design allows the driver to warp into Borneo hyperspace, reducing traveling time but causing nausea to the passengers (darn it's supposed to be an animated .GIF to show how extreme the warp is but Blogger does not support that feature, snapshots of it will do then).

So what do I do during the 7 hours trip? Well, nothing. I just sit there, listen to my freshly downloaded MP3s and think about life with my eyes closed. Now that I'm back in Kampua Town again for the 2nd free week, I'm just gonna laze around and see some stuff in town since I've been liberated from major assignments :)