It’s been almost 3 years since we’ve written anything in this blog, 3 years since we’ve travelled out of Singapore, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. With international borders opening up again, we decided to restart our travel plans and share them here.
Recently we drove up to Melaka with a couple of friends — Teck Hwa and Yan Hui. We crossed the Causeway with Yan Hui as early as we could manage to try to avoid the crowd. Even so it took us about 2 hours to cross the border, with most of the delay being at:
1. Waiting for the bus from Woodlands Checkpoint (30 mins)
2. Waiting for immigration clearance at CIQ Johor (1 hour)
We met Teck Hwa at 9.45am to begin our drive.
Johore Bahru (JB) is expensive these days. Teck Hwa, who is more familiar with the prices here, tells us that the average price of a meal in JB these days is higher than in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Because of that, we decided to have breakfast outside of JB.
PONTIAN DISTRICT
Our first stop was a coffee shop near the town of Pekan Nanas, which is famous for its pineapple plantation industry. Its name literally means ‘pineapple town’.
Baby Tilapia had found this coffee shop called Kopi O Kampong on Google Maps. It served the best coffee we drank throughout our 3-day trip.
Next up, we had our first breakfast at 8383 Coffee Shop in Pontian Kechil (or Pontian Town), where we had soft-boiled eggs, kaya toast, and more coffee that was not as good.
But we must say that coffee everywhere in Malaysia is better than most coffee in Singapore. It’s thicker, and more flavourful than coffee shops in Singapore which tend to serve dilute coffee.
Our second breakfast was at Sin Kee Wan Tan Mee, also in Pontian.
This is not the famous Pontian wantan mee that you can find in Singapore. Actually the famous Pontian wantan mee is nothing like the wantan mee in Pontian.
The wantan mee in Pontian is known for its tomato based sauce. You can also order in with soya sauce though. The noodles are nice and springy.
In Singapore, the Pontian wantan mee is known for its deep fried wantan. So when you bring a Singaporean to Pontian to eat the wantan mee here, they will always ask, “Why don’t have deep fried wantan?”
Some Singaporeans like the wantan mee in Pontian so much that they will drive here and order 20-30 packets to bring back to Singapore.
Pontian town itself has two halves. There’s the northern part which is considered Old Pontian, and the southern part which is New Pontian.
Over in New Pontian, there is a rather nice jetty full of yachts. There’s a road that leads out and curves around to form a kind of lagoon for the boats. It’s a nice, windy place to take photos, but for some reason, today’s high tide has made the water look like coffee.
We continued our drive up north, passing by Benut to take a look, but the town is small and doesn’t have anything of interest that we know of now.
We headed on to Batu Pahat after this, to visit a place that not many people from Singapore know about.
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Adventures of Baby Crab and Tilapia 
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