Border Crossing from Singapore to Malaysia

I’ve heard some border crossings are more difficult than others and I’m certain that many are far more challenging than going from Singapore to Malaysia. But, I’ve crossed borders into 14 countries now and none has taken much more than 30 or 40 minutes. Maybe I was lucky or perhaps there is some mysterious power in having an American passport. I don’t know. I do know that it took us about four hours to get across the border from Singapore into Malaysia. There were no hold ups that I can think of, just a lot of waiting in long lines. First we took a local, crowed bus (the A107) to the border. We hopped of with our luggage and proceeded to our first line to exit Singapore. We waited about 15 minutes in line until we were called forward to the person behind the desk who reviewed our passports, gave them a double stamp, and waived us through. No problem. After we were through, we walked downstairs to wait for our bus. We waited and waited. I half hour went by and our bus finally showed. We packed in and tried to keep from loosing our luggage or crushing some small child with a suitcase. Again we moved forward for a short five minute ride to our next destination, the Malaysian border. We managed to get all our luggage out of the bus again and followed hundreds of people into a large room. At the far end we could see the desks and men and women stamping passports, scanning finger prints, and asking people questions. We chose a line and waited. Slowly we moved forward a foot or two at a time. It took about an hour to make it across the room to where we were finally in front of the desks. I saw some terrified Arab girl who must have only been 14 standing there with fear in her eyes as two agents were discussing something and pointing at a computer screen and looking back up to her. I thought to myself, was this young girls a spy? Perhaps she was a smuggler or some drug lord. Who knew? I was called forward and flashed my American passport and tried to smile like the terrible picture on page two. The woman looked at me, looked down at the passport and then put the passport in some scanner box. After about 10 seconds she removed it, and banged down her rubber stamp on one of the pages. Each of us came through in just a few minutes time after which we gathered our things, made a quick bathroom stop and headed to the bus platform. This time we gave up on finding bus A107 and just grabbed the next bus heading to the central terminal in JB which was a 15 minute ride. All in all we took about 4 hours from the time we got on the bus to leave Singapore until when we arrived at the JB bus terminal. i was both amused by the strange experience and also physically and emotionally exhausted by the ordeal. It wasn’t until days later during dinner with a local in Malaka that I found out it only takes 20 minutes to get through the border on a weekday. The lesson I learned is to find out before crossing a border if there is a best time to cross or not and I vowed to put it in my checklist of future travel tips.