Nusajaya needs bees

The not so sexy part of my job involves travelling long distances to poke around dusty construction sites or view millions of boring scale models which start to look the same by the time you see Semi-D Phase 20 of the n-th housing development.

Avoid such a visit I can't, because its exactly what my job depends upon.

So it was that I found my bleary-eyed self in the back seat of the car in the wee morning hours, clutching a pillow in one hand and a coffee tumbler in the other, bracing myself for a long drive down to Johor.

Besides getting diarrhoea and having to make a pit stop in Pagoh, the journey to Nusajaya was a fairly uneventful one.

The interesting part really, was how much of nothing there was in all those catalytic developments in Nusajaya. While the residential part is slowly coming up, they still remain far out of the average Johorean's price range, and depending on Singaporeans to turn their noses towards this end of the Causeway to sell your houses sounds just a tad bit too high beta for me. If Singaporeans come, they come like bees. How many times have you just seen one bee buzzing around with no hive nearby? To be fair to them, their houses are actually very good and well-designed. If I were working in Singapore, I wouldn't think twice about buying a house in Nusajaya.

In all, the client I accompanied was a bit let down, he had hoped to see people, but all we saw most of the time was land. Clearing land, plantation land, dusty land, undulating land, golf land, land under construction, but seriously very few people.

I pray for my stock coverage sake that those catalytic developments in 2012 do not get derailed by change of government, change of heart, or change of economic winds.

We left at 5, stopped to have tea in Pagoh, and then arrived back in the city by 8pm. If my driver hadn't insisted he wanted to stop for tea and chat with a fellow driver he bumped into whose from an office building near ours in KL, we could have got back earlier. I think he fancies himself a pilot, the way he sped down the highway.

Luckily I was asleep otherwise I might have freaked out.

Lucky my boss wasn't in the car too - the driver might have gotten fired. Boss thinks he drives too fast.