Kuala Lumpur, the journey.😤

Lynne and I spent the whole day of Wednesday January 23 racing around in between bouts of packing in preparation for our 3 month trip to Kuala Lumpur. For me, this is the least enjoyable and most stressful part of traveling. The problems begin, trying to comply with the weight restrictions imposed by the airline. Check in luggage isn’t such a huge problem but carry on bags have to be kept to a maximum of 7kg. For someone like myself who carries a lot of camera gear this is a major pain in the butt! My camera bag with half of what I would ideally take with me weighs nearer 8/9kg. Then you have to add in an iPad Pro and a laptop. The airlines are getting a lot stricter these days so for the first time ever I put one of my lenses in one of the check in bags. That’s something most photographers would never do and I often wonder what on earth the professionals do when they carry far more equipment than me.

Anyway, after an exhausting day of last-minute preparations which included making the house as secure as is humanly possible we decided to leave the last few chores until the next morning. Our flight to KL was at 2.05pm so we needed to be at the airport not long after 11.00am. Obviously with so little time left, Lynne had booked an appointment to have her hair done that morning. While she was away I finished off my packing and ran round with the vacuum so that in theory at least the place should be quite respectable for when we return in May. Lynne returned from the hairdresser looking lovely as usual and by 10.45 I thought we were ready to go. At that moment she decided that the pair of shoes (flatties) that she planned to travel in needed repairing! The sole was flapping off at the front. Her idea was to use Gorilla glue (seems to think that’ll work with anything). The only problem as I advised her was that Gorilla glue takes about 10 hours to cure so I grabbed a tube of superglue and tried that, getting it all over my fingers as usual. So now I have dried superglue on two of my fingers which I just managed to pry apart and Lynne has gone to plan B which is simply a different pair of shoes! Half way to the airport Lynne realised that she hadn’t picked up the Malaysian currency which amounted to the equivalent of £70. This is totally par for the course where we are concerned, a bit like spending countless hours poring over a map of Norway marking off destinations to visit and then forgetting to take the bloody thing to Norway with you which is exactly what we did last year!🤨

Arriving at the airport brings us back to the problem of weight. We joined the queue for check in which thankfully didn’t take too long. Whilst waiting we could see people having their hand luggage weighed and having to open check in bags and swap things around to comply with the restrictions. I already had my camera with quite a hefty lens hanging on its strap over my shoulder as I’d read that this is acceptable but I knew my bag was still overweight. I took out my iPad Pro and put it under my jacket tucked into my armpit! I was now confident my bag would be within the limit. When they called us forward I managed to heave the check in bags (30kg) onto the scale without dropping the iPad clamped firmly under my armpit! Everything was weighed including carry on and we walked through to departures. So having put the camera and iPad back in the bag we then had to empty them all out to go through the X-ray checks. Belts, watches, phone, laptops and tablets all have to go through. None of this is anything people who have flown won’t already know about but what a pain in the arse! Lynne and I then go through the metal detector and out the other way to be reunited with our stuff except that Lynne’s handbag and our watches didn’t reappear. Momentary panic ensued until I realised they had been shoved sideways onto a different conveyor to be manually inspected. We then had to wait while a woman who could best be described as grumpy (yes I know, pot, kettle, black!) inspected someone else’s bag. When she got to ours it turned out Lynne had left a tub of one of her anti ageing creams in there. (Not working are they). Having established what the problem was, the whole bag then has to go through X-ray again. Mrs Grump told us we would have to wait a couple of minutes. After something nearer 10 minutes I was beginning to lose patience. It was then that I looked at the X-ray unit about 20 yards further on only to see Lynnes bag sitting there. No one had told us to go to a different unit and we were left wondering whether they actually enjoy winding people up. Maybe that’s the only way they can get through the day.

Long story short, we didn’t have to wait long in the departure lounge before boarding our Qatar Airlines flight to Doha which took off smack on time at 2.05pm. The flight was pleasant enough partly due to the plane being half empty so that we had 3 seats to ourselves which was nice. Arriving in Doha after just 6 hours 15 minutes we then had a wait of 2.5 hours for our flight to Kuala Lumpur but not before we’d gone through the whole X-ray ritual again. Equally as tedious as the one in Birmingham but ultimately necessary I suppose.

Doha airport was quite impressive with various huge artworks to admire. The following photo is of a rather large wooden boy, I have no idea what significance it has but there I am just to give a sense of scale.

The flight to KL was only half full just like the first one. This time we were flying through the night and we both tried to sleep. Like a proper sad sack I decided to watch It’s a Wonderful Life starring James Stewart. For the first time in years it hadn’t been on at Christmas so I took this opportunity to see it now. It’s an old favourite I never tire of! The rest of the time I spent sleeping on and off. This flight lasted just under 7 hours. After we’d been in the air for about 2.5 hours we hit the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. This went on for at least an hour and for the first time in all the years I’ve flown we experienced momentary weightlessness, as in, bum’s briefly left seat! Twice😳. Landing in Kuala Lumpur at 2.45pm we were 45 minutes early. It took roughly 15 minutes to get through immigration and then onto baggage reclaim. As soon as we got there, our bags were already on the carousel. This is in stark contrast to our usual experience in Birmingham where it’s not unheard of to have to wait an hour or more for bags to appear! Passing with our bags through customs we wandered out to look for our prearranged driver. Daniel had arranged for a car to pick us up and all we had to do was find someone holding my name up. It took about 5 minutes to get to the car and an hour or so to reach Daniels apartment after a tortuous drive into the city and out again. Kuala Lumpur has masses of construction going on which seems to affect the roads and routes around the city and I think its fair to say that the drivers really earn their money.

So, that was our journey to Kuala Lumpur. Ultimately uneventful but with all the usual irritations and a period of turbulence that left you wondering how the plane didn’t fall apart!

That evening we hung on and went out to eat just to stop ourselves falling asleep. Returning to the apartment we watched the latest episode of the Grand Tour with the 3 Top Gear idiots. I boldly predicted that Lynne would fall asleep within two minutes and then proceeded to do so myself!😴