Our Cycling Route Through Malaysia

Our cycling route through Malaysia

The map above shows the route we cycled through Malaysia. We entered Malaysia from southern Thailand and exited at Johor Bahru into Singapore

I should start by saying that Malaysia was our favourite country in Asia, there are many things in Asia that we didn’t like such as everyone trying to rip us off, charging us the “tourist price”, pushes sales people, etc. Malaysia had none of this, it’s a beautiful county with lovely people and it feels very safe everywhere. It’s the closest things to “home” we’ve found anywhere in the world.

However, it’s probably the worst country in Asia for cycling. The roads are simply not up to the standards you we’ve found everywhere else in Asia. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand 99% of the roads have a nice big shoulder for motorbikes and bicycles. The shoulder meant that ever when on a busy road you had a nice separation between you and the fast moving traffic. Their roads were also pristine. They had smooth and unbroken tarmac on nearly every road.

In Malaysia however, they only have a shoulder on maybe 50% of the roads we cycled on and it’s intermittent at best. This is probably because there are far more cars here and far fewer motorbikes, however it does make the roads feel much less safe as a cyclist.

The road surface was much poorer here too, the road surface is much more like the UK with a lot of rough and broken surfaces, potholes and patches. While the road surface was not horrendous by any means that intermitted issues did slow us down and resulted in quite a big hard knocks into pot holes.

Road side services such as shops and cafes were also much fewer in Malaysia, the once great 7 elevens of Thailand have mostly disappeared (outside of towns and cities) and they don’t offer anything close to what they did in Thailand.

Rain was much more frequent in Malaysia but it was never really an issue as the temperature is high enough that you never really feel cold (unless you walk into an air conditioned building while wet). Amusingly if a car drives through a puddle and splashes you the water is usually warm!

The upside to all this rain is the scenery, it is beautiful in Malaysia. The land is much more sculpted here too and residents often look after the land around their houses much like you would expect to find in Europe.

The traffic is often quite busy in Malaysia and while the roads are rarely “congested” there are often a lot of cars around. The driving standards are probably the best in Asia but you still have to “watch your back” as there are still plenty of idiots around and driving the wrong way up the road is still a thing here.

The most frustrating part of cycling and indeed walking in Malaysia is the traffic lights. The traffic lights are typically on a 2 minute cycle, so if you arrive at the lights just as they turn red you’ll be waiting 2 minutes (or perhaps more) for them to turn to green. When it’s blazingly hot and pouring with rain is can be quite frustrating to just stand around waiting.

The same issue exists when trying to cross a road on foot; on numerous occasions we’ve simply abandoned our plans to go somewhere because crossing the road was impossible. It can be even worse in place that don’t have traffic lights as the flow of traffic is so frequent you can never find a gap to safely cross.

As I mentioned at the start, we loved visiting Malaysia but we didn’t love the cycling. We didn’t hate it either, it just wasn’t as good as we’d hoped.

If you'd like to take a closer look at our route or use it for your plans you can download the .kml file using the button below. For PC users you can view this file type in "Google Earth Pro", available here: google.com/earth/versions/, for Android users we recommend maps.me and for iPhone users we also recommend maps.me.

Daily Cycling Activity

Below is a breakdown of our daily cycling activity, you can see our exact route and final destination each day using the map at the top of the page.