Our day begins with, let’s call it a last servicing of Escape Velocity and its Escapees. It’ll be a while before either gets any restorative attention and the toilet cassette is full so…well you know. We’ve spent the night on a high ridge at a pastural camp site in Tollymore Forest, swathed in what the Irish call a rising damp. Packing for what we call the “fly away season” is not going well. Normally we find a motel where we can spread out but in this posh rural community a posh-ish campsite will have to do. We Escapees are usually pros at this but compressed into our six meter campervan we’re finding it, let’s just say, challenging. For my part, I’m blaming our new very adult matching electric blue Osprey rolling duffels meant to replace our $19.99 single road warrior duffel. R.I.P.
Next on the list is a 45 minute drive featuring sad farewells at the end with our lovely friends at their estate in Kilkeel.
Alan, one of our oldest sailing buddies, is always the first to jump up to help, and has drawn taxi duty to deliver us Escapees to the cute bus station in Newry.
Another sad farewell and 15 minutes later he saves us, returning with our blinking tracker which we hadn’t yet discovered was AWOL. Bless you, my friend.
The Goldliner Bus has plush seats, the kind you could hopelessly pray for in your next airliner seat, and if our driver wasn’t trying to set a new land speed record to the Dublin airport, this would have been a pleasant hour long journey in the rain, but it only lasted 45 minutes!
Relaxed scrutiny at security, featuring my first “patdown-free walk-through” since replacing both my knees (thank you Dr. Lim), and before we were ready for it, we found ourselves wedged into the Dreamliner’s interpretation of adult seating befitting a seven and a half hour flight to Abu Dhabi.
I do find watching the Dreamliner’s bendy composite bouncing wings entertaining, while unbending my cramped legs and straining to tie my shoelaces with my face smashed into the seat ahead after landing, less so. Now Marce is a fast walker while I’m not so much, especially after basically not moving for seven and a half hours. The walk up a jetway is always a challenge in the best of circumstances, but always better if someone isn’t repeatedly saying, “Will you not hurry up? We have a tight connection!”
Next on the spreadsheet is a 7-hour triple seven to Kuala Lumpur and a reckoning with the time zone gods. Shuffling past the luxurious first class I saw the lumbering mass of someone in 31B with whom I was to become quite familiar. After climbing past this immovable human I found myself wedged and jammed into the window and fuselage wall. While his body continued to manspread and I suppose feeling quite relaxed and among friends, he fell soundly asleep. At first he slumped towards me and then he suddenly would jerk his massive head up and in five seconds he would be out cold and slumping towards my shoulder again. Is he doing a bit? How is it possible to jerk one’s head up and then repeatedly fall fast asleep every five seconds or so. Seven hours of this. It’s unendurable. We hadn’t even started the engines! I began to shove him back to a more or less upright position and in a while it seemed like I was making progress in training his subconscious mind to do what I wanted. This made me wonder if there were other things I could train his subconscious mind to do. Cooking? French? or maybe Piano? He never made a sound. I respected him for that.
Other than adventures in the subconscious and only one meal, the flight was mind-numbing and as we approached KL, dusk began to settle over the city.
I could see cloud to cloud lightening flashing through piled up thunderheads.
As the big jet began to let down I heard the landing gear thump into place, air racing through the wheels, and moisture laiden clouds stinging the outside of the fuselage. After landing we seemed to wander around the colorful lights of the absolutely dark airport for at least a half hour. I’m thinking well, now the pilot’s lost, but eventually we found our gate and disembarked. My special friend offered me a mint, turned and left with his friends. I like to think that he will remember me fondly in the future.
We bumfered around trying to find our bearings and Marce said, “Give me your passport.” I reached into my pocket but found nothing. I knew instantly that my passport must have come out of my pocket when I pulled my phone out to photograph our approach into KL. Every traveler’s nightmare. We ran to the info desk but there were so many people around that it was hard to impress upon them to get the turnaround crew to find my passport before they loaded the plane and it took off for parts unknown with my passport somewhere in the vicinity of seat 31A.
She called the gate while we raced back. The next lot of passengers was getting ready to board. We grabbed a crew member who told us to wait while she found the Right Person. The Right Person said they didn’t find anything and we should “go over there and look through your knapsack.” I knew it wasn’t there but Marce and I took turns searching the bag while we tried to think how to proceed without a passport. That’s when the gate crew came out and said, “Mr Jack, is this yours?” Yes! Indeed it is!
We ran back through the terminal only to find the same crowd jammed toward the driverless train that takes you to the other terminal building and Immigration. We noticed how markedly the crowd had grown and that’s not good.
The sign promised a train every 2-1/2 minutes. It didn’t come. After about ten minutes a train came and we all surged toward the doors but the doors didn’t open and the train left, empty. Technicians in hi-viz vests scowled. Back and forth, back and forth, the little train came and went but refused to open its doors. It was getting ugly. With the arrival of every plane, more and more people were compressed into a finite space with no relief valve.
Eventually they got the thing working and we jumped aboard. With a well armed populace…well I’m sure you can easily imagine an outcome, but in Malaysia it’s a smile and a please take my seat sir. But then they couldn’t get the doors closed. As more and more frustrated passengers tried to squeeze into the three cars one of the mechanics got the doors to close and we were finally off to Immigration.
The whole thing took so long that our new electric blue bags were on the floor beside the carousel with mountains of black suitcases. We raced to the bus terminal and got the last two seats for the 10pm bus to the city. When we got to the station, in a gesture as familiar as anything in Southeast Asia, Marce pulled up her Grab app and got a driver in an instant. Nine Ringgits later—that’s $2.13—we were at our posh-ish hotel, featuring whatever type of pillow your imagination can come up with. I went with firm.
So…went off without a hitch! Good on you!