Travelogue Series – April 2023 – Day Trip to The Desaru Fruit Farm and beach

We have been driving up to Malaysia pretty frequently since last Sept as we were getting bored of our small city state during the pandemic period where we were literally trapped in Singapore for more than 2 years. Not to forget that our exchange rate is currently hovering around 1SGD to RM3.30 to RM3.40 which makes it a perfect time to geo-arbitrage against the back drop of the high inflationary environment. All these factors pretty much sum up the massive jams being experienced since the re-opening of the borders last year. We avoided the jam as we started our day early where we reach the checkpoints at around 7am but still roughly require an hour to clear both customs. (We had been using the various apps to monitor the traffic condition at the causeway.) Guess we were lucky on that particular Sunday!

Previously, I blogged about our trip to Legoland and road trip to Malacca last year but Johor has still so much to offer other than their great food, shopping, massage etc. Johor state itself is more than 20 times bigger than Singapore plus they offer us something our city state do not have much which is nature. We were intending to explore their waterfalls, mountains, plantations, beaches etc and we chance upon the Desaru Fruit Farm on a day trip. Enroute to Desaru via Senai – Desaru Expressway, we drove past a beautiful Sungai Johor bridge.

Initially, we wanted to just go for the fruit farm tour (45mins – 1 hour) which includes a box of fresh fruits, educational tour, visit the herbs garden, vegetable plot, agricultural gallery and lastly to feed animals in the farm (feeds available at RM5). This package will cost about RM40 (adults) and RM35 (child from 3 – 11 years old, infant 0 -2 years enter for free). This will cost about RM150 which is SGD45 for the whole family.

Then we saw a similar package but includes a 20mins ATV (All-Terrain Vehicle) that cost about RM85 (adults) and RM70 (child from 3 – 11 years old, infant 0 -2 years enter for free). This will cost about RM310 which is SGD93 for the whole family. As both myself and Kate had not tried ATV before and both kids could sit behind us, we decided to go for it!

We boarded a bus to the starting point of the tour which is just a few minutes away as the entire farm is huge. The kids really love the educational farm tour which shows us all kinds of fruits, talked about bees and honey, fed some fish in the pond while lastly petting and feeding rabbits, goats, ducks, emu and many more. We took the bus back to get ready for the ATV experience which starts at around 12 noon. We were first told to wear a helmet before going for a short briefing on how to operate the ATV and how the kids should sit behind us. In no time, we were zipping around the farm following the ATV tour guide which was so much fun!

We were really famished after the end of all the activities and we drove to a nearby cafe (SDS Bakery & Cafeteria) which serves quality western food. We had beef bolognese spaghetti, mustard grilled salmon plus kids meal (Nuggets and spaghetti) and lastly their signature SDS Banana split. We paid around RM100 which is about SGD30 for the sumptuous meal for our family.

Next stop, we drove to the Desaru beach where the kids had loads of fun just playing with water. The beach is really nice with white-washed pristine sand and turquoise water facing the South China Sea which is something we don’t have back in Singapore. People were having picnic, playing guitar and you could also pay for water activities like banana boat, jet ski, parasailing etc. The greatest thing is that it is not really crowded on a Sunday so you could easily find a spot to lay your mat.

We were there for more than an hour before we start to make our way back to Johor Bahru where we did our grocery shopping before having our dinner at Aeon Tebrau. We normally purchase quite a bit of stuff from Aeon which is a supermarket which sells almost everything! We stock up quite a bit of household items, groceries, rice, snacks where the same item prices are normally cheaper by 20-50% as compared to Singapore.

Our kids love the recently opened Oriental Kopi which claims to sell the most number of their renowned thick Oriental egg tarts (menu with pricing). We personally also like the coffee, polo bun and nasi briyani and our kids love the prawn fried rice and fried golden mantou. We paid about RM82 for our dinner which is about SGD25.

Lastly, we went to get some books from Popular for our kids before going back to Singapore. Most books are relatively cheaper than Singapore so we always go Malaysia to shop for books and on top of that they could accept our Popular membership card thus we enjoy another 10% off. Then we went back to Singapore after re-fueling our car with their petrol grade 97 which is around RM3.37 as compared to our Singapore grade 95 at SGD2.80.

We had gone for another long road trip in Australia during the school holidays and will be posting it soon! Meanwhile, hope you enjoy our travelogue series so far!