Photo from Google Map

Here's the route from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (Malaysia) to King Abdulaziz International Airport (Jeddah), according to Google the distance is around 11000 km and it takes 140 hours to drive (?).

By plane, it took around 9 hours. We used Malaysia Airline (MAS) and alhamdulillah we didn't have to transit to anywhere. The time in Saudi Arabia is 5 hours before Malaysia.

(You may skip here if you don't wanna read about my personal life.)
Mak Ngah stopped by at our house cause she couldn't go to the airport. From our house, Nenek, Ucu and Ayah Cu sent us so they will take care of our car and stuffs. Over there, we met Acik and family. One of the officer of our travel agent, Barakah Umhaj Travel was there to give some last explanation and to gather us, only two families since our flight was actually being forward earlier, which was an advantage for us yeay!

Our flight left at 3.45 PM and reached KAIA at around 10 PM (SA clock). The whether was nice, but to be compared with Malaysia, yes it was rather chill.

My first impression : Dusty.

As I expected from a country developed from a desert, for sure it would be quite dusty! On top of that, I find it common in here to find expensive cars like Hummer covered in dust and spots of dents. Kemek. I assume it is because their driving culture is rather challenging so it'd be useless to fix them? LOL just get a new one, done. Is it so?

Once we reached Jeddah, we got on a shuttle bus from plane. There's a special entrance for those came for Umrah. We had to fill a small white form and pass it to the immigration officer (those process when you leave to overseas), and the surprise is here :

Once you're done with the immigration, your passport will be taken away immediately from a stranger.

That's what our travel agent has explained earlier so we co-operated well. It's not really a stranger actually but according to them, that one person will collect passports from everyone entering for Umrah, and our travel agent will settle down any process so basically throughout our stay in Makkah and Madinah, we're not gonna hold our own passports.

From Jeddah, we were sent to a shuttle bus which will send us to our hotel in Madinah.

The fun thing is we had to put our luggage in the shuttle from the window! LOL, these people.. They had even put some piece of cloth on the side of the window, probably a small carpet so our luggage will be easier to glide on. Since there was only two families from our travel agent during our flight, the shuttle was quite spacious and comfortable. Another family are 2 adults, a girl around 3 years old and a baby! 

While waiting for the travel agent, there was an awkward silent since nobody could speak Arabic.. Hahaha.. Ayah was forcing us to come out with some friendly words in Arabic so he could talk with the driver. Then he suddenly make some gesture, nobody understood except Ummi where he asked whether we had seen his phone!

We got our first meal in the shuttle, a fast food called Al-Baik which consisted of chicken nugget, fries, and bread.

Photo : http://ongct.wordpress.com/category/food/

We reached our hotel in Madinah at 3.30 am. That'd be the end of our first day. To be continued!

(This is my experience of performing Umrah during winter from 24th December 2013 - 5th January 2014. You can find other posts by going to the posts labelled MakkahMadinah which can be found at the left side of my blog. Thank you.)