Gonna make you sweat

Sunday, 30/09/2012 – 108 A.D.

[View from the hotel window.]

We weren’t disturbed by the early morning traffic sounds, despite a large gap at the top of the window. I think we were just glad to sleep on comfy beds after our long train journey. And it’s always easy to sleep well when your football team played superbly the night before ;-)

Our room in the Mayflower Glory Hotel (where did they come up with that name?) is fine, but not really designed for the fun pastime of hand washing and hanging the clothes up to dry. Therefore we undertook the hotel’s kind offer of laundry-facilities-at-a-price. Sooo we deliver a load of washing to them and they wash it for us, presumably drying it, possibly folding it, and hopefully not taking a token sock to sacrifice to the God of Laundrettes. The price is 5 ringgits for a kilo of dirty clothes, which works out at £1 a kilo of smelly grundies. The girl on reception took my manky carrier bag and weighed it on the scales, coming in at 2.2 kilos. Tim’s bag was only 1.1.  

Of the countries we want to hit in Asia, several of them haven’t heard of the Grayboys’ fame and therefore we require visas to enter their territory. That’s a bit of a bummer, but it’s not as if we’re simply crossing over from Lancashire into Yorkshire here. The problem is that even if you type in a direct question to Google like “How do you apply for visas overseas?” you get all kinds of unhelpful answers in response. There was only one thing for it and that was to march down to the British High Commission and get some direct advice on the matter. However, it would be quite a lengthy march, so it was time to learn how to use a new public mass transit system. This proved not to be too difficult and pretty economical. Instead of running on re-usable cards like in Singapore, here you get circular blue plastic tokens which are gobbled up by the machines once your journey is complete. It's another clever way of cutting down on littering.

It was a short walk to the British High Commission on Jalan Ampang (or Jalan Street), but I must have lost half my body weight in perspiration. Unfortunately it was a Sunday and the Commission was not taking visitors, so the guards told us to return the next morning. Seeing as we were in the area, we did the short walk to the Petronas Twin Towers, during which I lost, say, the weight of a watermelon in perspiration. The Petronas Twin Towers were at one point the highest building(s) in the world until they were overtaken by several structures in the 21^st century. They are, however, still the tallest twin buildings in the world. We didn’t feel the need to climb the towers, as we’ve seen lots of cities from high up, but we did need to go into the shopping mall beneath them to get some aircon down our backs.   

Soon we were back on the train and alighting at the station known as Dang Wangi because there were shopping malls in the area and we probably needed supplies. There are almost as many malls here as in Singapore…do they do nothing except shop in South East Asia? The goods on the supermarket shelves are starting to get quite indecipherable, though in the chilled section I clearly made out pigs ears, pigs hearts, and various other parts of the porker. After stocking up on a few things (nothing from the chilled section!) we walked back to the Mayview Glory Hotel with no quantity of anything left to perspire from our bodies. The happy chap behind reception greeted us, enthusiastically reminding us that Liverpool won the night before and M*n Un*ted lost (surprise, surprise, they are very big over here).

After resting and drinking what remained of our clean water supplies, we noticed the ominous clouds through the window and nipped out to top up the fluid situation before the monsoon came down. I bought 5.5 litres of water, a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi and a quarter bottle of rum, all for 20 ringgits, i.e. 4 quid. This is more like it! Come the evening we went down the road, stepping over the dead rat on the kerbside, and headed for a restaurant called The One. We’d spotted it earlier in the day and decided it looked quite clean and worth a try. Besides a couple of suits, we were the only people in there until a family of four came along, but it seemed like quite a swanky place for the surrounding area. That said, a full meal and a beer clocked in at about £6 each – once again, you can’t go wrong.

After the mistake we made last time of leaving our train booking until late, we got straight on the case that night and booked our passage into Thailand. The plan is to get the sleeper from KL up to Hat Yai, from which we’ll take a bus to the town of Krabi. So that’s all great, right? Sort of. My only concern is how the immigration process will work when we cross from Malaysia into Thailand, as the website doesn’t give anything away…will they wake us up in the middle of the night and herd us out of the carriage and through a full body scanner? Nyeargh, why worry about it now!