sunset at Port DicksonI am so glad to be out of KL! If I stayed any longer, I would be coming home in a body bag. I started out of the city at the peak of rush hour, much to my dismay. The plan was to pass through Putrajaya (just 20km south of KL), then down to Melaca (144 km away from KL).
As predicted, I was forced to get on the freeway to leave the city. I made the effort to avoid this, but the street that I was on morphed into a freeway after ten minutes without notice. It didn't seem so bad at the time, an explicit motorcycle lane was separate from the automobile portion.
Thirty minutes later, I saw a sign for Melaca and moved onto another freeway. This is when things started to go awry. First of all, there wasn't a cycle lane any more. I was now on a slim shoulder of a three-lane highway (each direction had it's own section of road).
The next problem was that the signs only mention cities but not cardinal directions. When I saw the sign to Melaca, a city for the opposite direction was listed. Given my lack of knowledge to the area, I ended up going west instead of east.
When I noticed that I was going the wrong way, I tried to correct the situation, but only made matters worse. As a result, by the time I got back on track and going in the right direction, I had already ridden for four hours and biked probably fifty kilometers off course.
fields of coconuts near Port DicksonMy eyes jumped out of my head when I saw the sign to Melaca (six hours after starting) saying 121 kilometers. At that point, I realized that I had to change the plan and stay the night at the next major town - Port Dickson.
130 kilometers (maybe, I just don't know how far I strayed off course), 7 hours
