Bring back the Malaysian east-west public ferry

 

Travel and tourism has been the greatest source of employment since 2013 but have been cut off at its knees in 2020 due to Covid-19. But has Malaysia responded appropriately to this catastrophic disruption?

Malaysians who usually take three-week vacations to Australia or the US to visit friends and relatives have changed their destinations to Teluk Intan, Ipoh and Penang over a 10-day motoring holiday.

Similarly, Australians, Japanese, South Koreans, Europeans and Americans have also switched their travel plans and instead of Malaysia have opted for domestic and regional tourism.

This is a good time for us to develop our regional and domestic tourism industry because we have a deep pool of demand from Malaysians and Indonesians.

Imagine if Sabahans, Sarawakians and Indonesians could enjoy the same standard of highways as Peninsular Malaysia.

The Pan-Borneo highway will happen sooner or later, which will be the case because the Indonesians have already completed a network of new highways. These roads will connect thriving Kalimantan towns which have a large population of motorcycles.

While it will be a few more years before a Borneo motoring travel and tour business takes off, we should explore the opportunity of the ferry service as public transport.

We should tap into the huge market of rich Indonesians (there are about 20 million), many of whom would have a budget to travel and tour in their own cars to Peninsular Malaysia up to Thailand.

Is that a wild dream? Norway, which has many islands, provides more than 100 car ferry connections and two international cruise carrier connections to Denmark, Germany, and Sweden.

The Norwegians consider that if there is no other way to go to work or to visit an office than by ferry, then the government will provide a free public ferry service.

Malaysia should adopt that concept and provide a public ferry service at a subsidised rate for Malaysians and commercial rates for non-Malaysians with connections between Port Klang, Penang, Kota Kinabalu and Kuching.

To unlock the gates to the rich Indonesian market, Malaysia will have to liberalise its cabotage policy and allow Indonesian-flagged ships to operate in Malaysia’s domestic sector on condition that all participants operate on a level playing field, such as a subsidised rate for Malaysians and operations according to international maritime health and safety standards.

Indonesia would probably have many ferry operators keen to provide services on commercially viable routes.

Currently, it costs about RM1,250 to ro-ro a car between Kota Kinabalu and Port Klang.

It would be timely for Malaysia to re-initiate a public transport car cruiser like Feri Malaysia where passengers were allowed to travel with their car at a subsidised fee while non-Malaysian vehicles and passengers were charged business class rates.

This is the time for Malaysia to tap the regional market using water-based public transport to leverage on the expanding Indonesian economy.

Trans Borneo expedition

I am now on the Trans Borneo 2021 Land Below the Wind expedition. The adventure started a week before the 10-day event in Sabah when the planned expedition vehicle’s gearbox balked and refused to engage at a traffic light in Kota Kinabalu.

It was a frantic week to bring back to life an old warhorse, an iconic Toyota Land Cruiser BJ60, that had been parked away for two years.

The Trans Borneo 4×4 event is born of Camel Trophy history when I was the first Malaysian to participate in this legendary off-road challenge where national teams competed in a 10-day event in identical Land Rover vehicles in an exotic location.

I later trained the Malaysian teams for two subsequent annual events, ending in Madagascar in the early 80s.

Inspired by this assignment, and with off-road enthusiasts from Sabah and James Ritchie from Sarawak, we organised two Trans Borneo events from Port Klang to Kuching to Kota Kinabalu using the Feri Malaysia, a car roro and passenger carrier.

Readers can follow the expedition at the Facebook page motorme.my. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.