Adventures By Design

In which the travelers do not enjoy their bus ride

Last night, after the night market, Ric staved off another wardrobe crisis by using his trademark “wash shirts in the plastic garbage pail” technique. But since we were leaving today, we’ll had to leave the air-conditioner on high all night so they would dry. The unfortunate side effect was that Gin woke up with a headache (and my clothes didn’t even dry, by the way.) Gin took some Advil while Ric went to a store to find something for breakfast. After that, we packed and checked out of the hotel, and found a taxi to the bus terminal.

Arriving at the bus terminal, after a little searching we found the ticket booths. There were several booths selling tickets to Kuala Lumpur. We had no idea which one to take, so we looked for the names of bus companies we recognized. No luck. So, essentially at random, we approached a counter and bought two tickets for the next bus. The price was the same as it had been when we traveled from KL, so we assumed that this bus experience would be similar. Coming down we had a comfortable and pleasant ninety-minute ride down a freshly-paved toll highway, and both of us fell asleep for most of it.

It wasn’t a horrible experience, and nothing like what Janet went through last year when she was projectile-vomited upon by a two year old and had to marinate in milky stomach juices for several hours, but still it wasn’t the pleasant experience we expected. First, our bus was twenty minutes late, then we drove for literally two minutes, and stopped for fuel. And there we sat for long enough that folks on the bus started to wonder if the driver has suffered a coronary in the bathroom. Finally he reemerged and our trip could begin in earnest. After a few minutes it became clear that we would not be retracing our course along the smooth toll highway, but instead we took a secondary (or tertiary) local road. With the radio blasting horrible pop music then intermittent static, the bus swaying nauseatingly around the corners, and screaming children behind us, it was tolerable, but irritating.

Eventually we made it to KL, and after scurrying across rush hour traffic carrying out huge backpacks, the hunt was on for a hotel. We visited a tiny hotel that we had seen a week earlier, but they wanted RM80 ($26) for a tiny dirty room no bigger than the bed. We declined, and walked half a block to the hotel we had stayed at before: the Citin. The good news was they had room available; the bad news was because it was the weekend, the rate was now RM140 ($45) a night, which was about $10 more than we paid last time. We decided that rather than spend hours carrying our luggage across the neighborhood, we’d just pay the rate.

After some trouble with the key, resulting in changing rooms, and hanging up Ric’s laundry, we went out to find lunch. We walked to a touristy area, had lunch, then walked around looking for a cinema to see a movie. Eventually, thanks to Starbuck’s wifi internet, we found one that was close by.

We saw Speed Racer (featuring Korea’s pop star Rain). It was colorful and plastic, sexy but sanitized for a young audience, and the graphics were video game-esque. But any movie that employs a chimp for comic relief has a lot of lost ground to make up for, and this one just couldn’t deliver. If movies in your area are more than the $3.50 that we spent, we’d recommend waiting until it’s on video.

Tomorrow we’re off to Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands, where rumor has it the temperature is ten degrees cooler than here.