This Christmas I was bumming around South East Asia with Madison
Melton: romantic sap extraordinaire and Dorte Oretega Neumeister: college essay
procrastinator extraordinaire.
I'm not too sure
how this came about, but I was in great demand for Christmas trips across the
board and this one with it's small righteous American and cooler-than-me
Ecuadorian covering 6 countries in 3 weeks was the most appealing, and so I
ended up in Dorte's room about a month before trawling trip advisor with an
excitable Maddie throwing her credit card deets at every cockroach ridden
hostel we could find (hi maddie you will be caricatured throughout for humour
value kthnxbai).
Christmas was soon
upon us and straight after school on the 14th of December we packed our bags
with clean knickers, plasters and even Maddie brought a towel. Marching out of
school and onward to adventure, we - oh wait Hannah forgot her camera. We
eventually wound up on the east rail line, the concentration of mainlanders and
noise increasing as we drew closer towards Lo Wu. Still relatively clean at
this point we managed to get through the border to Shenzhen with little
difficulty and a good few stamps. Backpacks in tow we had our first beef noodle
soup from a small shop across the road from the bus station before trekking
back and forth between various bus stations late at night with the wrong kind
of 票 (or so Maddie said - I am doubtful ever since the pork bun china
week incident). I was freaking out at the prospect of things failing miserably
on day one, Dorte was radiating Ecuadorian peace vibes and Maddie was ecstatic
that her masterplan to get us stuck in China was being realised. We did
eventually make it onto our sleeper bus, sharing our one bottle of water, some
gum and our first packet of oreos. That was the most comfortable night's sleep
I had the entire holiday and I woke up bouncing along the road to Nanning in
time to write Clody a letter and read some of Jonathan Raban's Driving
Home.
The next day we
pulled into Nanning, bought some dirt cheap buns, made some insanely excited
friends on the bus we took to get to the train station and then sat in Dico's
(rip off KFC China style) for about 5 hours. This was interspersed with trips
to the toilet, purchases of kilos and kilos of mandarins and furry lychees, pot
noodles and photoshoots with starstruck Chinese. As well as a 40minute long Uno battle to the grave. The train, though in the end
one of our most luxurious modes of transportation, was at first glance a rather
tight squeeze. We played big 2 and Maddie kept winning. Maddie and I drank our
pot noodle soup and Dorte avoided the inevitable carcinogens of doing so. The
train was headed from Nanning to Hanoi which meant that there was going to be a
late night border crossing. We were rudely awaken by a skeletal man in a
foreboding uniform banging on our compartment which we shared with a chinese
man and woman yelling PASSPORT. So naturally we handed over our passports for
fear of our lives. I managed to nod off again before there was another knock
and we were ushered (or rudely forced) off the train to sit in a cold room with
a load of disgruntled strangers. I nearly shat myself when I realised I'd left
my passport on the train and would have to walk past the heartless zombie
guards to reclaim it. Maddie and Dorte can vouch for that. That border crossing
over, we had a few more hours of disturbed sleep on the train (not for Maddie,
the log child) before pulling into Hanoi at roughly 5 in the morning with only
Dorte’s well remembered 100RMB changed into Vietnamese dong. This unfortunately
was not enough to make it the few kilometres to our hostel by taxi so we paired
up with an Indonesian and had an “issue” upon arriving at our hostel at 5:30
without the means to pay for the taxi. After trying the atms over and over and
cursing the uselessness of Hong Kong dollars we threw some RMB at him and ran
away, tripping over some stray dogs on the way. Ringing the bell of the hostel
with a certain degree of trepidation warranted a sleepy looking face appearing
from behind the rising metal shutter and shooing us from the Friendly
Backpacker’s Hostel to the Elizabeth Hotel across the road. We brushed our
teeth and washed our faces for the first time in what was an unhygienic amount
of time (the first of many) and shared computer time between myself and Dorte;
Maddie passed out peacefully on the only couch in the lobby aside from the one
the concierge was drooling on. At 7 we were promised free breakfast and I
flipped, pulling the IT’S ALL A TRAP THEY WANT OUR MONEY disgruntled white
tourist card. Turns out they were actually being incredibly hospitable and in
the end I had two delicious fried egg baguettes and a hape of dragon fruit.
We bummed around the lobby of the Friendly Backpacker’s hostel for
a while until we could check in then bounded up the stairs and had showers.
These showers were somewhat ethereal; in the water stained mirror one could
watch the dirt peel away until one had changed colour. Magic. We talked for a
short while with the a dirty Londonese motorbike enthusiast and a Russian girl
who clinged to his every word and was on her way to buy a motorbike before
heading out to Hanoi for a walk. The few days we spent in Hanoi were some of
the best; drinking mango shakes on plastic stools in a church square, walking
around the lake and the old quarter trying to find the cheapest backpack,
eating pho and drinking tiger beer. And laughing at Maddie as her impoverished children facial infection grew. Maddie and I went to visit Uncle Ho but he was
off getting a facial in Russia so we just saw the mausoleum instead. Maddie got
scammed by a friendly banana seller and spent about $10 on bananas which I didn’t
eat because I was too busy laughing. Everyday was a game of real life Frogger,
death defying experiences with every motorbike at every turn for every quest
for every cheap kebab. We went to Ha Long Bay on the cheapest day trip we could
find, made friends with an American girl over our disgust for the halfway stops
to marble statue workshops where a packet of m&ms would set you back as
much as we’d paid for the bus journey itself. Ha Long was, of course, stunning,
and the seafood on the boat wasn’t bad either. We bumped into the Indonesian we’d
shared a taxi with and the Chinese lady who’d been on our train whilst kayaking
through caves we refused to pay for. The massive cave we stopped at was lit
like a Filipino club but that made the experience all the better, if lacking in
some Cher. The tiny minibus seemed to take years to make the torturous journey
back to Hanoi but we held out on the gold plated m&ms with the promise of a
kebab and a good old can of Tiger on our valiant return.
We took an overnight train to Danang to get to Hoi An from Hanoi,
which arrived at 5am. Or 6am. Or shit why aren’t we there yet it’s 8am. Hey Mr,
DANANG? IS THIS DANANG? HAVE WE MISSED IT? No miss, no miss, keep waiting. Hey
guys I think we’ve missed it. It’s 11am. We’ll just skip Hoi An and go straight
to Ho Chi Minh. …Oh wait Maddie read the schedule wrong. We get in at 1. So we
got in at 1, where we were accosted by a pretentious English guy trying to find
someone to share his mini bus with. Dorte was convinced that we would get
trafficked, but Maddie “Students Against Slavery” Melton and Hannah “Common
Sense” Read persuaded her otherwise and we got a darn good deal, whizzing past
the abandoned resorts lining the coast to Hoi An. We were only in Hoi An for a
night, staying at the Loc Phat homestay. The minibus driver was a friend of the
woman who owned the house and got her helper to collect us from the end of the dirty
lane where we walked to the lime house and she offered us sacrificial guavas
from the shrine in the living room. We borrowed bikes and cycled the 15 minutes
to the waterfront where we drank overpriced coconuts and Dorte bought a dress.
We headed back so that Dorte could have her “about to kill us nap”, showered
and got ready to head back out for dinner. It was pouring with rain but I
persisted that we cycle to the waterfront again where I could relive my garlic
fried fish of two years previous. Soaked to the bone we ate, and even had a
dessert of banana pancakes. We managed to get back albeit bedraggled, had an
excellent sleep and woke up the next morning to go and get breakfast again on
bikes. Dorte headed back to be a common app slave whilst Maddie and I temple
hopped and stocked up on nutritious supplies for the forthcoming journey to Ho
Chi Minh. 3 packets of Ritz crackers, and two of Oreos.
This next 17 hour train journey was fraught with obnoxiously loud
milk adverts, one of which used a digitalised version of “If you’re happy and
you know it”. By 3am I could have destroyed that television but was held back
only by the distraction at the end of our carriage of a fist fight going on
between someone who wanted their seat pushed back and someone who didn’t. With strangers’
hands and feet peeking through all and any gaps between the seats I was
surprised that not everyone was going beserk at each other. From the train
station in Ho Chi Minh we got motorbikes to our hostel, Dorte falling asleep
with boredom and Maddie squealing with delight at every roundabout. Here was
another early morning hostel crash, and we lay on the floor of the lobby with
another three displaced travellers until 8 waiting for a free room. I read my
book against the vending machine, Maddie again lucked out with the couch and
the fan. The room wasn’t ready by the time our stomachs were digesting
themselves and they weren’t prepared to offer us free breakfast down south so
we headed out round the corner to a market where we had strange whole shrimp
pancake omelette salad things which we pretended to like for each other but
didn’t in retrospect. There were these skinned live zombie frogs with no faces for
sale which were easily the best creatures I’ve ever seen. In Ho Chi Minh we
went to the war museum, didn’t make it into the church on time, couldn’t afford
the Reunification Palace, used the posh toilets in a department store, as well
as visited a few generic touristy markets where we may well have been in the
Ladies Market in Mong Kok. The war museum was a fairly shocking experience, in
the Agent Orange section there was a foetus in a glass case which as you can
probably imagine was a fairly hard hitting installation so to speak. Paying our entry in also meant that we had to budget fairly hard and share a single small bag of chips and rely of a two litre of 7up to sustain ourselves (ok just me). The next
day we visited the post office and I sent letters to the fam before we headed
to the Ho Chi Minh museum which was quite closed. From here we strode to the
army surplus market, where I battled for a naff Buddhist flashing wall light
for Dad’s Christmas present along the way. The army surplus was a mass of
corrugated iron and dusty uniforms with fake veteran Zippos and old black and
white photos in heaps for rows on end. Easily the best part of Ho Chi Minh, it
was pretty surreal. It certainly beat watching the scottish guy in our room with 3 girls’ names
tattooed on him groan with a 3 day long hangover or the fat guy in our hostel taking
prostitutes up to his room. Madison “Stella and Dave groupie numero uno” Melton
wrote a strongly worded indignant letter to him. And kept it to herself.
We got a coach to Cambodia for our third border crossing. I may well have drawn a Cambodian visa on my passport with a green Crayola
pencil than gone to the effort of securing an e-visa but either way the
crossing was uneventful – the highlight being the mass produced Korean OAP tourists
with perms and pink velour waistcoats. After driving through the insanely flat
plains of Cambodia for a few hours we arrived in the mish mash that is Phnom
Penh where we fought off the tuktuk drivers only to realise we needed one to
get to Amanda’s sex basement (under the guise of a movie house). In the words of mo Dhaidí, "Dutch Movie House Yoga Place sounds like a poor euphemism for brothel". We arrived at
the Flicks where Amanda made us the infamous Phnom Penh hotdog – we recreated
her iconic photo – and we watched Trading Places and The Nightmare Before
Christmas. It was so nice to dance around in socks to Christmas songs and Ramon
was an unreal host (despite our concerns for Amanda’s sexual safety). We went
to the Russian market the next day and I had the most excellentestly beautiful
fried noodles of my life and yet another mango shake whilst the other three
drowned in an endless sea of iced coffee. Following this was a trip to the
genocide museum, which was more impressive for the setting – an ex-school which
had been turned into a prison – than anything else. Photos showing people dead
on the beds which were right in front of you and a room full of skulls, some
with bullet holes, was enough to keep us morbid up until our next visit to the
Killing Fields. This is one of many sites in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge had
murdered hundreds if not thousands of people and buried them in mass graves.
The ground at the killing fields was cratered where the bodies below had decomposed.
There was a huge monument built in the middle where skulls of the victims had
been stacked in a tower. Whilst in there one fell from maybe 20 metres and
scraped my nose before smashing at my feet. Permit me some profanities. Poor
Dorte had to deal with a hysteric me whilst she was listening to a recollection
of how the babies had been murdered. Bear in mind that this was Christmas Eve.
That said, there were celebrations to be getting on with and so we returned
back to the flicks, helped Manda with les customers and headed out for dinner
where we had 3$ juicy fillet steaks and piles of morning glory with unlimited
beer. Ramon joined us halfway through and had his own steak before taking us
out to a cocktail bar on the Waterfront. We headed back and sat around in the
living room, drinking beers from the cinema fridge and getting slowly drunk
before we realised it was 2am on Christmas morning, each of us reading or
common app-ing. I woke up on Christmas morning with Maddie in the duvet-less
double bed beside me and chuckled a bit before sharing out the last of the
rationed Quality Streets and beginning to pack up my stuff. We went out with
Manda Panda to the bakery and stocked up for our next journey, a bus ride
across Cambodia to Siem Reap.
The journey took 9 hours longer than it really
should have done, due to a distinct lack of roads. We pulled into the town and
got collected by a tuktuk with our name (okay actually Amanda’s name) on it
which took us to our hostel. We had dinner and I skyped les parents from
underneath a table in the lobby to wish them a Happy Christmas before heading
upstairs to our rooms to crash out in anticipation of getting woken up at 4:30 to go see
Angkor Wat in all its glory. Angkor Wat in all its glory was really something
quite spectacular, but Dorte pulled a Clodagh and refused to acknowledge that
anything was worth waking up before sunrise for until a few weeks later. Even
Maddie’s chipper was dim. We played real life Temple Run for a while and hunted
down the cheapest 2L bottle of water like it was our mission before heading
back into Siem Reap on the tuktuk where we got fish pedicures – it was gross,
like hundreds of little cats wiping their sandpapery tongues on you – had more
mango stuff and got a delicious meal for 75c of a huge plate of morning glory.
Getting back to the hostel I passed out fully clothed and thus forgot to remind
Dorte to wake up and do her college apps.
Our next journey was into the hellish land that is Thailand on a
budget. Our bus was (naturally) late but we made it to the world’s most
notorious human trafficking border without too much conundrum. Dorte made friends with a Mexican on the way and I made the most of this opportunity to borrow her iPod to fulfill my Gwen Stefani needs (YOU’RE STILL A SUPER HOT FEMALE). But then
disaster struck. Maddie was trafficked We had queued for hours in scolding heat
in no-man’s land with no food or water waiting to cross into Thailand and when
I reached the front I ran through, skipping merrily into the promised holy land
of mango sticky rice and hermaphrodites and waited for Dorte and Maddie. But
they never came. Whilst I was chilling on my rucksack in the DO NOT LINGER HERE
zone, watching drug deals, reading my book and rationing the last of the Oreos,
Dorte was being frogmarched back to Cambodia for trying to double passport the
border, Maddie “Portable Peer Supporter” Melton on hand. Eventually after
threatening deportation to Phnom Penh, Dorte’s woe stricken face made it
through by police escort. We didn’t even have to pay for the privilege which
must be a bit of an achievement. We waited around at this hellish border for a
while more until we managed to get a mini bus that was going to take us to
Bangkok with some angry white people. The bus unloaded us a good bit away from
our hostel and fairly late at night so we had to get a taxi there. The taxi
driver drove us there, saw the state of it and pleaded and begged us to stay elsewhere.
Buut it was better than the hellish rat infested alleyway hole we’d imagined so
we valiantly walked into a total bumhole. Within two minutes of sitting down
and handing over our money to a whacked out dreadlocked French guy to the
amusement of the people at the bar and under the nervy stares of the lost Chinese
people in the corner, a miserably dressed woman lurched downstairs yelling
incoherent accusations and throwing bottles which skimmed past our
disinterested feet. I was about to write “we went to bed and fell asleep” but
to do so would be a disservice to beds everywhere. I went to plyboard plank on
distorted elevated metal frame and forced myself into a state of less than
conscious before waking up at three am (ish) thinking hmm, I feel a little bit
shite and then realising that BLEURGH all over the door of our 12 metal frame
dorm, and, pushing past that BLEURGH all over the corridor outside. Luckily for
me, the Overstay is the kind of place one can find abandoned t-shirts and boxes
labelled “free clothing” with which to perform a methodical cleaning up,
disposing of the rags in the “toilet’s” “bin”. The next morning (after what
seemed like years of staring out the window to a Thai life insurance billboard),
I managed to grunt at the others that there was no way in hell (Thailand) that
I was going to make any effort to move, so for the morning it was me, my “pillow”,the
garish graffiti (okay 1 in 4 pieces was impressive) and the lifeless junkies “sleeping”
in the “beds” below. By late afternoon I was coerced into leaving by the other
two and I managed a jelly fruit pouch from 7/11. We went to the internet café
where I mooched around on bookface and the common app slaves slaved on their
common apps. That evening we went to Khaosan road, nearly got Maddie a fake ID,
got me some braids to tame the fuzz that was the increasingly bird’s nesty
blonde lump at the front of my face, and bumped into the Cambodian border
Mexican. We sorted out a train and bus to Phuket the next day and it all seemed
so very very easy. We tried to find some fabled fireworks and instead found
Maddie some cheap plaid shirts, before heading back to the cesspool of why not
to do too many drugs kids. The next day we had huge plans to visit all the
temples Bangkok had to offer but instead we couldn’t afford them. We did go to
the longest reclining Buddha in the world and filled our water bottles from the
water fountain at the end though which made the experience well worth the
100baht we paid in. We had strayed slightly from the beaten track on the way
there, finding a somewhat haphazard market where I bought a camera case and
nearly a novelty landline phone. We went back to Khaosan via a park and a
market where I got blueberry Fanta which turned my insides turquoise, and tried
to find a t-shirt for Dorte’s brother. Considering the fact the Khaosan Road
might as well be called T-shirt Road this was harder than expected. From there
we got a taxi to where the train would leave, and Maddie and I took the
opportunity to kickstart our international singing careers by butchering Living
on a Prayer. The train was fairly grim with hard seats and no way of getting
comfortable but whilst Dorte was doing her thang and befriending the Spanish
speakers, I did manage to have a listen to Humbug which sent me dozing a
little. The American couple sitting opposite Maddie and myself looked on the
brink of tears but little did we know how close we would soon be.
I woke up the next day (can you wake up without sleeping?) to find
that the train had been delayed about 3 hours, which meant that we’d missed our
bus. Getting off at our stop we were assured that this didn’t matter and that
we’d just catch the next bus direct to Phuket. So we got on a bus which had an
interior like a 70s Dr Who rocketship and which took us all of 5km to a food
stop where we wasted money on some nutrition and lamented the crumbling of our
holiday. We complained a bit but there were too many Russians and Australians
and not enough Americans to make a difference. Eventually we were carted in the
back of a pick up truck with 10 too many people another 5km to yet another food
stop. Where we stayed for hours. And hours. And hours. Of course, all the while
watching other people buy into their messed up business idea of stranding white
people on the side of the road with overpriced sandwiches until they give in.
We didn’t give in, we just yelled a lot and I nearly hitchhiked to Phuket.
Maddie and I lacked angry assertive fathers and Dorte was just killing people
with her death ray eyes, whilst everyone else ordered private cars or sat mute.
By the time the bus came about 5 hours after we should have arrived in Phuket
we weren’t even mildly happy, just emotionless. We reached a travel agency
after dark where a quite amiable but condescending transvestite laughed at our
plight and Maddie’s indignant snapping. We got a taxi to our hostel which was
conveniently situated in the middle of nowhere and left Dorte for dead on the
bed whilst Maddie and I ate ready meals from the 7/11 petrol station down the road. The next morning
we left for the beach, borrowing the hostel’s towels and fashioning bikini-less
Maddie a bikini out of Amanda’s bra that I had. We got a car there and set up
shop, hoping to run in Jimmy B, Sarah, Mai and Ana at some point. We didn’t,
but it was okay cause we spent a day in the waves, not being able to afford a
sun lounger with shade, bought our first proper meal in Thailand (well mine
anyway), made me a sumo wrestler and a
turtle and got hideously hideously burnt. The sunburn was unlike any other but
we managed to steal some internet from the Scandinavian hotel of choice and get
in touch with James who we planned to meet in Patong for NYE. No one would take
us there in a tuktuk because of the traffic but eventually we managed to beg
and plead with one woman who agreed to take us halfway there and let us walk
the rest for a generous fee. We had to comply, and made it to Patong where a French
couple were in a tuktuk heading towards the main beach. We joined them and
agreed to split the cost and when dropped off the 500 metres later and paying
the agreed price that tuktuk driver flipped and was shouting at us for not
paying extra per person. He chased after Dorte and grabbed her bag until we
managed to get lost in the crowd and some other tourists shouted back at him.
We went down Bangla Road with its mass produced scenes of debauchery and found
James and his sister and friend. After one beer each Maddie and Dorte had both
thrown up from the effects of not eating properly for a few days and sunstroke.
By the time midnight and the new year rolled around we were destroyed wrecks of
past human beings,I carrying Maddie around and all of us slathering aloe vera
on each other (which I later found I was allergic to) and trying valiantly to
smile amidst the ping pong shows and silly string. Though the (ingenious) plan
had been to stay out all night, not book a hostel and then head back to the
hostel we had stayed at the night before to get a bus to the train station to
escape the god awful country in the morning, we had to give in and admit that
we really needed to sleep. We had no other option than to get a tuktuk back to
the hostel we had stayed at, Maddie lying comatose on one side covered in her
ratty white towel, Dorte and I sore and silent. We reached the hostel and snuck
in the back, finding refuge in a single toilet cubicle, and sat in the puddle
by the little hose on my shoes only in my underwear cause clothes were too
painful to wear, Dorte on the toilet seat and Maddie shivering in the other
corner. After a few minutes Dorte rightfully pulled a “fuck this shit” and
left, leaving the two of us in anticipation of the other’s inevitable panic
attack. We heard voices talking about someone being found and Maddie flipped
out about being caught for trespassing and taken to the Thai police and so
being on the lookout for Dorte we snuck out of the hostel (this is about 2:30am)
and walked to the 7/11 where we took turns trying to sleep on the benches
outside, powering through a packet of chewing gum and being hassled by stray
dogs. I couldn’t sleep at all and I was in agony, Maddie throwing up black bile
in the squat toilet round the back. Every so often I’d check the time on the
credit card machine in the petrol station; 2:45, 3:42, 5:17, until 6:45 when we
walked back petrified to the hostel to find Dorte, who had spent the night in a
slightly more spacious toilet downstairs. The hostel woman was raging because
we’d lost her towels, I had a personal crisis because I was a good-for-nothing
towel stealer until we paid her off in return for a few minutes of internet to
let Sophia know we were planning to arrive into Kuala Lumpur the next morning.
We went out to the end of the lane to wait for the mini bus to take us to the
train station. We had a mightily important train to catch in order not to be
homeless and totally broke and, worst of all, in Thailand. 15 minutes, half an
hour, an hour ticked past, marking the gradual loss of all resolve and faith in
humanity. The bus came eventually, and we begged them to take us to Hat Yai in
time for our train. The driver looked fairly incredulous, most likely because
he was only going to drop us off at the travel agency. We were ignored as bus
after bus went off from the shop until we finally got on another only to be dropped
off down the road, picked up again and promised over again that we’d make our
train, and picked up one last time. We stopped for lunch at about 1, where
the driver said “Okay now here for 20
minutes then it takes us 3 hours to get to Hat Yai ok?”. Which was really not
very okay because our train left at 4. Maddie: PLEASE WE NEED TO BE THERE AT
3:30! Driver: Yes, we get there in three hours! I cried a little under my scarf
and didn’t speak, Maddie pleading NO 3 THIRTY. YOU SAID 3 THIRTY. PLEASE.
PLEASE. Until Dorte whipped out the Cambodia-Thailand border crossing puppy dog
face and the driver looked at an angle to the sky, thought and then time
stopped as he wrote 3:40 down on the paper. My heart was in my throat for the next 2 and a
half hours. He drove like god knows what, drifting on the corners of paddy
field lanes when the traffic was too much on the main road, zigzagging at
140km/h along the dual carriageway. We made it into a gridlocked Hat Yai at 3:41. Following signs for the bus station we
cringed; nonononononononononotraintrainpleasepleasepleasetraintraintrain. At
3:45 we spotted a train track and he pulled into the carpark. The first helpful
person in Thailand had just probably just saved our lives. I shook his hand
like I ent never shaken anyone’s hand before and we legged it to the station with
our rucksacks, our sunburnt backs getting rubbed raw. Sitting on the train at
3:50 it still doesn’t quite seem real. We made it to the Thai Malaysian border
in a state of shock. People were lovely to us, even the border control people
smiled and we floated back onto the train on a pink fluffy cloud bound for the
heaven that is Kuala Lumpur. That night Maddie and Dorte passed out but I seriously
must have been fairly shell shocked or sunburnt or cold under the air con that
I stayed conscious until we pulled into Kuala Lumpur main station in the early
hours of the morning.
<no photos remain of the worst new year of our lives>
We had no ringgit at all to get the light rail to Sophia’s side of
town or to get any food – we hadn’t exactly eaten the day before save some
cheap fake Oreos – so we fell asleep outside the KFC in the station until we
managed to get a little money out to get onto the train, I completely toasted
and unable to walk or see straight from 2 hours of no sleep and 5 days of
Thailand. We reached there at about 9,
found a payphone and some fried rice and sat down on some cardboard, watching
Maddie wake Sophia up on the phone with a voice trying to be light hearted and
carefree. Sophia turned up a short while later and had to deal with the most
unreal smell (we hadn’t showered since the first night in Phuket and had been
in the sea in the meanwhile) and the very sight of us was probably enough to
make one’s stomach turn. Regardless, she took us to her house and we showered
and recuperated, before we ate. Roti and fried rice and lamb curry and fried
chicken and banana roti and sugar roti and cheese roti and mango lassies and
orange cake and Hershey’s peanut butter cups and biryani and yoghurt salad and
chutney and mangosteens and durian and macaroons and Taiwanese dessert and
Froyo and sushi and…probably more food in that one day than I ate in 5 days in
Thailand. I had the most delicious sleep and the next day we went to get nasi
lemak and iced milo and then met Mustapha in the KLCC shopping mall before
heading to the zoo which we couldn’t afford so instead we went on a free monkey
safari through the suburbs which was infinitely better. Kuala Lumpur then
dissolves into a magical culinary journey complete with running through thunderstorms
in pursuit of shaved ice, walks in parks, photos by fountains, kebabs, Turkish ice-cream
magicians, snow globe exploits and free birthday donuts and beer for Dorte. Our
final leg meant getting up at 3:45 to catch a taxi to the airport. Of course
being the cheap eejits we were (the entire trip) we went with AirAsia which
meant that they used the cheap terminal and not the one we got the taxi to, so
in the end we got a lift with a shady character pretending to be a taxi driver
for money but by this stage my “avoid scams to make Daddy proud” resolve was
wearing thin. We blew our last bits of money on more donuts and broke plenty of
handbaggage rules before boarding our first and last flight of the journey.
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h
(This blog post was 5,600 odd words long which is about the amount
of kilometres we travelled. Hurhur)
