It was all very last minute. But In the end I flew to Malaysia to go to a workshop at the APRICOT conference in Kuala Lumpur. The day started slowly. I decided to cancel all my bookings for Friday evening and Saturday and this turned out to be a good thing. I was able to prepare slowly and get everything done. Three hours before the flight left I headed to the airport by foot. The International Terminal is a few km closer than the domestic one. Though it was hot and I did have a bit of a twinge in my knee.
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At the airport there was a long queue. It took over 1 hour and 20 minutes for me to get to a check-in counter and through the x-ray machines.
The flight to Kuala Lumpur was quite full. They were using some form of manual check-in at the gate and later a woman came looking for me. They did not realise I was on the aircraft and were looking for me. The man next to me is also Mr Yap, so when the woman came looking for me said “Are you Mr Yap,?” he said yes, then she said you are in the wrong seat, but looking at the boarding pass realised that he was in the right seat, so I had to speak up and say I was also Mr Yap and in this case the right one and yes I was already on the aircraft.
Food wise we had nuts and a drink, followed later by a dinner, of lamb curry. Later I had a supper with chicken roll and a muesli bar.
AT 15:05 (Sydney Time) I bought a power adaptor on the aircraft, my first in flight purchase when the other Mr Yap was quite keen to get me one as I had mentioned that I had forgotten my power adaptors.
The flight path went over the top end of SA, then the NT, and WA. We left Australia just to the north of Exmoth, but the cloud cover was such that there was not much to see.
The flight staff laughed, they thought that I was the son of the man beside me as we are both Yaps and we I can speak with his accent as it is natural to me and I am being comfortable and at home with the body language and social structure. He is the CEO of a auto industry company and spends his time travelling around expanding the size of his company. Definitely the most interesting person I have sat next to for decades. He also though I was the most interesting person he had ever travelled with.
As the sun set we travelled over Indonesia between the islands of Java and Bali. I could see the port on the coast of Bali I had used when I travelled these islands in 1991.
We arrived about 5 minutes late due to stronger than expected headwinds.
The airport is quite nice. I went down to immigration and then out to luggage collection. The luggage was taking it’s time so I found an ATM and got some cash. When i got back the luggage had bothered to show up. So I got a ticket for the express train and I am now heading into town. I found the airport signs bit lacking and took a few wrong turns. It was after 1 am Sydney time. I was looking forward to some sleep.
I caught the KLIA express train. 4 French women of wildly varying ages sat opposite me. The spoke of savants amongst other things. I was surprised at how comfortable I am listening to French though my vocabulary is still very small.
Getting off the train at central I now felt that I was back in Asia. As before I had difficulty finding signs. But after one wrong attempt, I found my way back through the building, out the correct entrance, down some steps, through a construction zone to the terminus of the monorail.
I caught the monorail, quite cheap at 2.80 r for the trip to my stop. At the second stop, two girls from the airport express, also with backpacks got on. They had gone past me when I was returning from having gone the wrong way.
The monorail train was just two carriages long and became quite crowded. I managed to sit right up the front and was able to see the driver and the view forward. The dashboard was quite sophisticated. The monorail track was banked through the corners, but the transition to the flat and back was quite brutal.
When I got to the hotel it turned out I had booked the wrong one. I booked in, has a quick shower and tried out the Internet. The secure access does not appear and the public access has all my software saying that something is very wrong and it us insecure, so I went back down. But a big group had just arrived so I decided to wait until the morning, bought and consumed a can of lychee juice and went back up to go to sleep. The power plug adaptor I purchased turned out to not be necessary as the room has a single multi-plug socket, which is really a very good idea.
