Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
I got a rough sleep on Sunday night meaning I wasn't exactly primed for the long journey to here in Malaysia. I spent my last hours in Varanasi talking to a nervous Australian traveller about Varanasi before taking an uber to the airport. Weirdly I brought a book about Mossad.
Anyway, the airport was small and quite crowded but overall quite efficient. I flew Vistara, which is Singapore Airlines's Indian son, sat in a row with a couple of Italian nervous flyers.
Delhi Airport is quite far out to the south of the city and I didn't really fancy the hot congested city streets. So instead, my last hours in India were spent browsing Delhi Airport's 12 gazillion WH Smiths, having a Paneer and going to Costa Coffee.
The flight was probably the worst timed flight I've ever taken. It's basically 11pm to 4am though landing in Malaysia at 7am local time.So it sort of looks like an overnight flight but its more early in the night to late in the night flight. Still, I think I managed to get a couple hours sleep but still I'm very half awake at the moment. And I've got a flight at 7:30am tomorrow...
Because Indians need visas for Malaysia, and a busy flight from Shenzhen China had just arrived, immigration was the longest queue I've ever been in. After 40minutes waiting, by the time it was my turn it literally took 1 minute to get me in.
I navigated the endless overpriced restaurants of the departure area, and dodged taxi touts, and eventually found the 'Skybus' to downtown Kuala Lumpur. I had to buy a nervous Chinese traveller who couldn't speak English a ticket (he paid me back of course).
So I'm now in Kuala Lumpur! Home to 7.5million people it's very smoggy today, probably a combination of the traffic and haze from Indonesian forest fires though this is not as bad as in past years. I still managed to get ripped off by an Indian taxi driver to get to the hostel which bizarrely is on the 26th floor of an apartment complex. Itdoes afford it an epic though hazy view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline.
Will have to do some exploring for lunch though this is a bit of soulless area of the city. KL and Malaysia seem so sanitized and concrete in comparison to the colour and chaos of India. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Whilst my lungs are likely still suffering, at least my blood pressure won't be!
Selamat Tinggal!
- comments