Remember that 52-hour travel day to the Philippines? This one puts that one to shame – kind of. We left Hua Hin, Thailand on Sunday the 27th. We arrived at the border on Sunday night. A few teams made it across the border, but the rest of us weren’t able to cross due to the buses, timing, and some boring logistical details.
Our wonderful squad leaders got on to the two buses and told us that we’d be spending the night on the bus! Yippee! They parked the buses and we headed for McDonalds – at least we could get some ice cream before loading back on the buses for the night. A few short minutes later, Tess came in to the McDonalds and told us we needed to go to the bus and get our stuff! As we walked, we were informed that the bus company had not been so nice. We unloaded the buses and headed for a hotel.
Night one turned out to be quite enjoyable. Instead of sleeping on a bus, we slept in a hotel room with air conditioning. I probably should’ve stopped my timer – but I didn’t.
We woke up on Monday morning and began walking over the border. It’s about a mile long walk from the hotel to the other side of the border where a new bus would pick us up. It was fun. We made it through the border without a hitch! We hung out on the Malaysian side of the border for about an hour until our bus arrived.
The bus drove us from the border to Panang where we stayed the night at the local YWAM base (thanks, YWAM!). Once again, I didn’t stop the timer even though we had beds and A/C.
The next morning our team left the YWAM base to go find a bus to take us to Kuala Lumpur. Our journey inside Malaysia had just begun. At this point we were quickly approaching the 52-hour mark.
To keep a long story short and to have something to write about in my next blog, I’ll sum up the next 30 hours or so. We found a bus, arrived in Kuala Lumpur. We spent the night in Kuala Lumpur and caught a bus the next morning to our destination (can’t disclose our destination due to laws regarding the spread of the name of Jesus). Final travel time = 72 hours exactly!
We arrived at our ministry site and we were exhausted. We arrived a day later than they had planned so we had to jump right in to ministry! More to come!
