Selamat Datang!
Two weeks ago it was the
famous TET, ie. Lunar New Year (ie. Chinese New Year, but it is
celebrated in many South-East Asian countries so...), meaning a week
off work. Me and my Portuguese friend Patricia decided to go to
Malaysia. Why Malaysia? Why not Malaysia. It has twin towers,
beaches, and is a new country I know nothing about. Except that the
food is delicious.
The plan was I'd fly into KL
(Kuala Lumpur, for future reference) (Patricia flew a few days
earlier) on the Monday, and on Wednesday night we would take the
night bus to Kuala Perlis, from where we'd take a ferry to the
stunning island of Langkawi, where we'd stay until Monday morning
when we'd fly to KL and back to HCMC.
A lot of travelling, and
obviously all never goes to plan when in this part of the world... So
this entry shall be about TRAVELLING IN MALAYSIA. (And as a warm-up act: I survived Malaysia Airlines. Three times. A very pleasant experience and I recommend it!)
THE MALAYSIAN TRAVEL ADVENTURE:
So,
KL-Langkawi. We had bought tickets beforehand, so here was the plan:
11pm be at bus station,
find platform, get on bus.
11.30pm bus leaves KL
6.30am bus arrives at Kuala
Perlis, the mainland town near Langkawi
7.00am first ferry leaves
Kuala Perlis to Langkawi with us on it
8.30am probably be at
guesthouse at this time, potentially have a morning nap, ready for a
full afternoon's Langkawi adventure.
As you may guess, it wasn't
as simple as that. And at least partly due to the fact our travel
night fell on the actual night of the Lunar New Year...
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| Commencing the adventure... |
We arrived at the bus station at 11pm, and
realised we could not find what platform the bus was leaving from.
Luckily something that Malaysia is not lacking in is staff (the
amount of times I've sadly rudely ignored helpful Malaysian staff
just by thinking they were sleazy random guys), and so we asked one
of these dudes who probably was working there (they rarely wear
anything in forms of identifying that they work there, they're in
casual clothes usually) where our bus leaves.
“Where you go?”
“Langkawi.” We showed
him our tickets.
The dude gestured to the
large, long mass of people “queueing” in the middle of the
otherwise pretty empty ticket area.
No, no, we already HAVE
tickets, we explained. (When I say “we”, I usually mean Patricia,
the super confident travel organiser of mine.)
Yes, yes, go and “queue”,
instructed dude. We sighed – he clearly did not understand. But
when the next dude, and the next, told us to join that same ocean of
people, we started to think otherwise.
It turned out you had to
pick up some kind of other ticket before boarding the bus, and this
was the “Queue” for it. I guess it makes sense in a way – at an
airport you have to pick up your boarding pass, you can't just walk
into the plane with your online reservation -, but still, it seemed
unnecessarily... annoying.
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| In the midst of the first "Queue" of many... |
So, ended up in this
“Queue”, vaguely heading towards these two ticket counters. Quite
quickly we realised that although barging through a queue (in Asia,
if you don't move forward as soon as the person in front of you does
(or next to you, for that matter), that space is up for grabs by
anyone) would take us way too long if we wanted to be on time for our
bus, there were people around us still queueing up for a bus whose
leaving time was at least half an hour before our's.
It took probably about an
hour for me to get to the ticket counter, get handed two very quickly
written, er, tickets, while Patricia watched our bags further off.
Platform 14. Coolios.
Surprisingly, it was easy
enough to find.
Unsurprisingly, the bus –
not so much.
And even if we'd known immediately which bus, swimming
through the sea of people waiting would not be the easiest of life
achievements...
The “queue” on the
platform went all the way up the stairs. Some people were squidging
past the queue, and we decided to do likewise since our bus's
official departure time had been and gone. The people mass kept on spilling off the edges onto platform 15, on the other side - a few times a bus arriving on platform 15 had to honk at some tourist with a back-bag too close.
There appeared to be two
buses waiting at Platform 14, neither with their doors open. No one
waiting seemed to know what was happening. Finally we found a vaguely
official looking dude, looking very busy, who annoyedly pointed us to
the second bus. This was not anything definite as it was very crowdy,
and we had no idea if he actually heard our destination or not.
So we squeezed over to
vaguely hang out in front of the second bus. Then, a dude near us,
hearing our convo, told us the Kuala Perlis-bus was actually the
FIRST bus (which made much more sense in all honesty, as our bus was
meant to leave ages ago). So, squidging to the first bus. Where we were then told, by the actual driver, that we wanted to be on the SECOND
bus. Which had meanwhile started boarding, and we had lost our prime
place. Sigh, sneakily done, random dude in front of our bus, steering
us to the wrong one so HE could get our prime place...
Surprisingly, we got seats
next to each other. There was still constant confusion and something
that became very near to a physical fight between the staff and
customers (apparently the nonplussed staff dude was making fun of
this foreign couple who were trying to find their assigned seat
numbers... In all fairness, I didn't believe in assigned seat numbers
until some of our new bus friends later on told us that they too had
assigned seat numbers... which they obviously did not get.), but I
was happy to be finally safe and sound curled in my window seat,
finally sat down and not expected to get up for a long, long time.
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| Confusion |
And the bus trip was fine.
Well, as fine as you could imagine in a packed no-bedded night bus.
The people in front of us reclined their seats to the max, and
Patricia had a temperamental Hungarian girl with very long legs
behind her, so she couldn't recline her seat, but I napped on and
off.
We had a very surreal
brekkie at a service station packed with locals at 7am. It was quite
a highlight actually. Supertired we walked round the food stalls
selling numerous mystery meat sauces, but I settled for a lovely Iced
Milo (the Nesquik equivalent here. One cute thing about Malaysia is
how it is so the main drink to drink. Not water, not beer, not Coke,
everyone just drinks Iced Milo.) and flat noodles. Believe it or not,
it was one of the best meals of the holiday. (And not saying AT ALL
that food quality was in any ways lacking!)
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| The view from brekkie place |
A few hours later finally arrived at
Kuala Perlis. It was 9.30 am as opposed to the eta 6.30am, but oh
well. Next stop: Get ferry tickets, get on ferry, arrive in Langkawi.
Not so fast.
I'm pretty sure we vaguely
queue-jumped. But since you can never be sure since the queues are
more like herds, I dunno. I know that when Patricia was watching the
bags and it was just me and our new (Tatar!!!) friend Liliya, and we
attempted to move forwards in the queue, a Malaysian man frowned at
us, and pointed to a line behind us, roughly the length of the
Amazon. I swear, honestly, it hadn't been there five minutes ago when we joined the queue.
Had we queue-jumped!?
I wasn't confident enough
to blatantly potentially queue-jump, but luckily Patricia came back
soon, and confidentally and experiencedly (is that a word? I don't
think so) advanced in the queue not worrying about queue-jumping.
For the next hour, I sat
next to, around and on our bags, ending up constantly nodding off on
them.
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| The guardian of the bags |
Finally Patricia came up to
me. She'd got the tickets! Hurray! Only not for the next ferry as you
would imagine, but for the next ferry with space, ie. the one at 3.45
pm.
Party at Kuala Perlis it
is.
Except Kuala Perlis has
nothing.
We avoided the KFC and went
to sit in the only other eating hole we could find, a typical
outdoory (well, it was inside but with no walls so it was open to the
street, if you get what I mean) restauranty-caféey thing packed with
people. My time to queue, so I stood in line for twenty minutes to
order a coffee with no sugar or milk for Patricia, a roti canai for
Patricia and a watermelon juice for me. Well, instead I got a coffee
with sugar and milk for Patricia, no roti canai, and another coffee
for me as the (stressed, understandably) girl refused to serve me
watermelon juice. (That coffee ended up mostly on the table and my
trousers after I knocked it accidentally, followed by a pathetic
overtiredness cry.)
Next, we needed wifi so
that Patricia could inform our guesthouse we'd be late. Wifi was
given to her begrudgingly by a local motel, so we sat down in front of
the hotel to wifi. Which gradually progressed to us sleeping in front
of the said motel. (I had luckily packed my kiwi bag full of clothes
so it served as an excellent pillow) On the streets, having people
stare at us funny and a set of kids go constantly in and out of the
hotel just to have sneaky peaks at us. I felt pathetically homeless
and ridiculously hilarious at the same time.
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| Not our best moment |
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| One member of our audience |
3pmish we tiredly trundled
to the ferry station where flocks of other very bored people were
hanging out – tourists and locals alike. Our ferry actually left only half an hour late, despite what looked like quite a hopeless situation whilst waiting amongst all the other people...
 |
| Waiting for the ferries |
In the end we boarded our ferry – and, contrary to what I
said earlier about seat numbers, we actually DID have seat numbers –
and from then onwards it was, believe it or not, relatively
plain-sailing.
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| Hello Langkawi! |
Got to our guesthouse only about 10 hours late, and
even managed a very, very tired yet scrumptious dinner with fellow
guesthousers, and slept a very long and good night. :)
And that was the end of our
Biggest Malaysian Travel Adventure. Lesson of the day: Do not use
night buses. And more importantly, do not travel on Chinese New
Year...
More pleasant Malaysian adventures to be shared shortly...
EMMMMZYYYY
XXXXXX
