As soon as I stepped into our office on the morning of Wednesday, August 9, 2006, the Project Manager for the Klang Valley Public Transportation Information System announced that disgruntled bus passengers in Penang were staging a peaceful demonstration on Friday, August 11, 2006. She’d just read about it in Penang’s grassroots activism website, www.penangwatch.net. Guess what, I was assigned to cover this event and build contacts with transit activists in and around Penang!

Before I reported for work the next morning, I went to KL Sentral to purchase a train ticket to Bukit Mertajam, and went straight to this futuristic railway station right after work on Thursday evening. Armed with a take-away dinner pack, I found my seat on the north-bound Langkawi Express.