Off to the airport with she who must be obeyed, who had wangled two days away from work using the equitable strategy of not receiving any salary for the time off. We fly Air Asia on the grounds it is a fraction of the price of Thai Airlines. It departs on time, arrives early and is not full, so no complaints.
The downside of flying Air Asia into Kuala Lumpur is that you arrive at the low-cost terminal which is somewhat basic and does not offer a train into town. We check out the bus companies and an eager young lady assures us that their bus leaves every 15 minutes and the next one leaves in 7 minutes. This is bollocks and we sit in a scruffy bus for nearly half an hour before we are finally wheezing and smoking our way into downtown KL. Once at the bus terminal, we fail to find a taxi prepared to use a meter and end up paying around 200 baht equivalent for a journey that was probably worth half that.
My son’s partner, Jackie, had done considerable research into the holiday, such that the hotels had been chosen with care, and each location had already been marked with a wide variety of restaurant options. The hotel chosen for the KL stay was the Mandarin Oriental, and very smart it was too. We had a view of the Petronas Towers which was a pretty cool thing to have outside your bedroom window.
We met up with Harry and Jackie and then headed out for dinner and a stroll around the mall and surrounding park.
Back to the room to exchange presents, Harry’s XXth birthday and my XXth birthday. I got a book with an inscription which, when I read it, coincided with some dust getting in my eye and some moisture appearing. Still brings a lump my throat when I read it. I also got some collector’s item Grand Theft Auto IV stickers which I intend sticking in prominent places.
The next morning we head out to Brickfields, the Indian area of KL, to have a breakfast of roti chanai and fish curry which is my favourite Malaysian food. Have yet to find anywhere in Thailand which offers roti chanai to match Malaysia. I ate three and felt adequately full.
Off to the Lake Gardens where we checked out some butterflies…
…before lunch at an excellent restaurant in Chinatown.
In the evening we had our birthday dinner at a Malay restaurant called Bijan where the food was wonderful. Finished off the evening by meeting up with a Thai friend at a nearby bar before heading back to the hotel.
The following morning, it was time for she who must be obeyed to return to Thailand and work. She had been most impressed to be staying in an Oriental hotel and had to be strip-searched before we left to find all the items from the room she had intended to liberate. Even so, she made off with a couple of pens, a laundry bag and assorted bathroom items. Put her in a taxi to the airport and the rest of us checked out the hire car we were to use.
Malaysia makes its own cars. Originally, there was only a re-branded Mitusbishi, the Saga; but now there is a wide range of weirdly-named offerings. How about a Waja, or a Pert, or a Savvy? Doesn’t matter which you choose, they are all crap. But given the punishing import tariffs, nearly everyone buys a Proton; and we were give a Perdana V6. Everything creaked, the engine sounded more like a damaged tractor diesel than a V6 and there was a strange smell which seems to be common to all Protons, maybe caused by the rotting plastic seating. At one point, while parked in a petrol station, it decided to set off the alarm system for several minutes for no good reason; causing much amusement to other drivers who had no doubt suffered similar events in less public places.
But it came with a GPS, which was to save us from being totally lost on more than one occasion. The inbuilt voice was obnoxious and with a limited vocabulary. The instructions to make a U-turn, for example, consisted of saying “turn right, then turn right.”
So, we entered “Cameron Highlands” as the destination in the GPS, fired up the lumpy V6, and headed gingerly out of the hotel car park. Little did we know what horrors awaited us on our journey.
To be continued…..