As the title says, “greetings from Malaysia!” This first offshore entry on the blog has been a little bit delayed, because as some of you know, it hasn’t all been plain sailing in week 1. But let’s start at the start: for those who think Air Asia is some sort of third rate airline, forget it! We had an excellent 11 hour flight from Christchurch to Kuala Lumpur and with the aid of just NZ$39 (total) spent on extra seats, had a row of 3 seats each so managed some very worthwhile sleep (the flight left CHC at 1.10am). The seats were good, there was plenty of legroom (even without the extra seats), meals were OK if a little bit odd menu wise, and the flight was smooth despite there being some fantastic lightning displays in clouds not that far away at time!

Arrival into KL was as expected – hot, smelly and humid. But we’ve since discovered that not all of the city is like that…the areas around Burkit Bintang, the Convention Centre, the Petronas Towers etc., are ultra modern, very tidy, populated with all the name shops in huge malls…..a complete contrast to the area our hotel is in, on the fringes of Chinatown. KL is a city of polar opposites – in one direction there is great wealth, and extremely modern facilities whilst just a few hundred metres away, there are beggars on the footpath (if in fact there even is a footpath) selling tissues from at least 9am until 9pm in the case of the supposedly blind man outside our hotel, for 20 Malaysian cents a packet – that’s NZ8 cents.

That’s another thing – it’s pretty cheap here for most things although oddly, home appliances like TVs are twice the price we are used to! We went into, guess where, Harvey Norman last night at the Mid Valley Megamall (largest mall in SE Asia so we are told) and TVs that would be well under $1000 at home were the equivalent of $2000+ here. On the other hand you can travel miles in a “teksi” for less than 10 ringgit, a cup of coffee is around 3 RM, a bottle of water under 1 RM, the movies (“The Hunger Games”) cost just 14 RM each, a decent feed with a Tiger beer each in Chinatown is around 60 RM…..that’s $4, $1.20, 36c, $5.60 and $24 respectively. There are many examples – but just one more: our 7 night stay at the Citin Pudu hotel cost us RM738….that’s $42 a night including breakfast and we are in a ‘deluxe’ room. To be fair, we haven’t seen any other rooms so what constitutes ‘standard’ remains a mystery at this stage – but how they pay the cleaners, the reception team, the manager, the cafe staff, the security man on the door and so on and so forth, all for the equivalent of all the combined lots of $42 is beyond us! The minimum wage here must be less than a packet of tissues perhaps? By the way, “deluxe” seems to mean “adequate but with a fantastic view of the KL Tower and the Petronas Towers out our window”.

Now, so as not to bore you senseless in episode one, just a quick note to say that I had my bag (man purse but that’s acceptable when you’re a tourist) flogged on Tuesday – day 2 – so spent much of that day being alternately upset and then patient ( as patient as I can be that is) with the Tourist Police as they painstakingly took a statement. A lot of time was also spent on phone calls and emails to banks, phone company, insurance company etc etc. Such fun!! To cut a long story short, the bag is well and truly gone, as are about 8 debit and credit cards, my iPhone and a bit of cash, plus a few personal items that are just a pain to not have! But within 48 hours the phone was replaced and restored to where the old one had been (good old Apple), we had BNZ cards couriered from Singapore overnight, and we pick up NBNZ cards at an ANZ branch in Cambodia in about 10 days!

That’s enough for tonight – I will fill in all the details of what we’ve been doing this week in the next day or so before we leave for Vietnam (small teaser – we are both qualified pewter bowl makers now). If you want to jump ahead though and view a sample of the photos to date, go to the link below to see the start of Album 1

All the best – catch you again soon

Andrew

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