The Malaysia Chronicles – Legoland

This is part 2 of our Singapore-Malaysia travels during Christmas last year. Here’s the first part. Malaysia started on an ominous note with heavy thunderstorms on our first day there when we spent a day in Legoland in Johor Bahru.

Legoland is actually closer to Singapore than Kuala Lumpur, so we were advised that the best way to get there was to take a day-trip bus from Singapore. And that’s what we did. We booked a bus starting early morning from the Singapore Flyer.

What we didn’t realize though was that a huge amount of time would be wasted in immigration and custom formalities at the border. We easily spent 90 minutes each ways in the long immigration and security checks.

Such a bummer because we reached Legoland only at 11:00 am and in the pouring rain. Another 40 minutes was spent huddling in the bus stop waiting for the rain to let up. Finally, it was our patience that wore out and we did a mad dash through the storm to the Legoland entrance.

Piglet promptly made his way to the Lego store, and we all followed meekly thankful to get out of the rain. He and Snubnose made their purchase decisions fairly promptly (a Spiderman Duplo for him, and a Friends Lego for her), we purchased some Legoland rain gear that the store was selling in droves, and made our round of the theme park.

By now it was almost 12, and we were quite sure it was going to be a flop of a day, considering that our bus driver had threatened us that if we came back to the bus stop after 5 he would just leave without us.

Ack! On with our bright new yellow Legoland rain coats, map in hand, and back out in the rain.

Since, we were pretty much wet anyway, we started off with a water ride. We queued up for the Legoland Aquazone Water Racers. One upside of all that rain was that queues were extremely short, and we could go on a lot of rides multiple times back to back without any waiting.

We then walked our way along stopping at all the rides we fancied. There were still long lines for a couple of the coasters, and since we had already lost a lot of time, we gave them a skip.

Instead we went on the toy train ride, which Piglet enjoyed so much that we promptly went a second time.

Another memorable ride was the Observation Tower, which is exactly like what its name says. It’s a slow ride to the top from where you get some amazing views of the surrounding countryside. A nice pleasant ride, which all of us enjoyed. Also, by this time, the sun was out, and we took the opportunity to dry out while enjoying the beautiful scenery.

Hands down our favorite ride was the Dino Island ride, which we very ambitiously tried after having a full lunch.

After the huge splash, we spent some time chilling at the sweet Legoland play area. We also grabbed the downtime opportunity to click a few snaps with some of the awesome Lego exhibits scattered around the place.

Finally making our way to Miniland, which has some beautiful Lego models of world-famous monuments and even entire city blocks. Amazing!

By then it was time up, and we rushed back to our bus to face the tedious ride and long immigration and customs formalities to re-enter Singapore.

Sigh! In our bid to save money we had opted not to stay at the Legoland hotel in Johor Bahru, and I don’t precisely regret that decision. However I do wish that the paperwork was handled a bit more efficiently at the border.

Still after a dismal start to the day, I was relieved that we had a great time. The kids in fact count Legoland as one of their favorite experiences of the trip.

Coming up soon – our time in Langkawi and Kuala Lumpur.