Kuala Lumpur out trip--last one since I got my 13A

(September 2010)

The trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia went well. It is a very modern city with lots of tall buildings and freeways. Tampoka and I agree that we like Singapore better as we had found our place there in a neighborhood where there are people sitting in outdoor cafes all night and the food is cheap.

The same cultures are represented in Malaysia, the same four language groups found in Singapore which is only 8 hours away by train. Malaysian which is very close to Indonesian and related to the Philippine languages; Indian; English but without the British accent of Singapore; and Chinese.

There are a lot more Moslems in KL than in Singapore. Mostly women dressed in scarves and nice looking colorful clothes, but we saw one young couple with the woman peering through an eye slit and otherwise covered in black, and her husband had a big black beard. That sort of thing must be rare in the cities by now.

The cheapo airline we use in the Phils only has one flight to KL so we arrived after midnight and couldn’t take the subway which is the cheapest and fastest way to get to town which is an hour from the airport. We didn’t learn until we were ready to leave that we didn’t come into Kuala Lumpur International Airport so if not for the suggestion of a very helpful hotel employee we would have taken the train to the wrong airport when we were ready to go home.

But unlike Singapore there is an express bus to town after the train shuts down for the night so it only cost 10 Ringgit (RM10) or about $3.35 each to get to KL from the airport. Once there we were accosted by a crowd of taxi drivers shouting at us, “My friend! My friend!” and that phrase makes me skeptical so I didn’t take the first offer but probably should have. I had no idea how much further to the hotel but I’ve gotten into the habit of asking a lot of questions when I’m traveling in foreign places because it saves a lot of wear and tear on the nerves to at least have someone’s opinion of what might happen next. So I thought there might be a ten minute taxi ride to the hotel based on the bus driver’s guess. A taxi driver had offered to take us for RM25 or about $8 which sounded high, especially compared to the Philippines where you can ride the taxi all day for $50. So we bypassed the crowd of drivers at the door of the bus and started to look for a way to the surface of the planet. The bus terminal was a sort of artificial alley with a big steel wall on one side and concrete crenulations and stairways and such on the left. Turned out we were at the subway station or right outside it but that was closed anyway. At times like this everything is scary so I was glad one of the taxi drivers pursued us because I wasn’t really sure I wanted to see the surface of the planet in a strange Asian city at 2 a.m.

Our pursuer suggested we pay him RM45 for a ride to our hotel. He was very aggressive and agitated but well dressed so I suggested he charge us only RM25 like the other guy had offered and we settled on RM30.

He drove like a bat out of hell on empty streets and up and down freeway ramps and we arrived at the hotel in about 5 minutes. We got out and I was preparing to fork over the RM30 or about $10 but it was literally 10 times what I’d have had to pay for a metered taxi in the Philippines, and then I saw the sign on the side of the taxi for the first time: “This is a metered taxi. Haggling is forbidden.” I remembered what I’d read on the internet: only take metered taxis in KL. All the drivers at the bus terminal had sworn that they only use coupons and showed me that the coupon shack was closed for the night.

So I asked to see the meter and he refused to show it to me. We went around and around a little but I kept my money in my hand and went inside to ask the hotel staff if I was being had. They assured me that I was being had, and another man there said we should not pay more than RM15. I went back out and asked to see the meter again but the agitated driver just kept getting more agitated. I didn’t want to raise my voice as I didn’t think it would help, so I went back inside. Tampoka told me to just pay but I requested she let me handle it. I felt a strong sense of support from the hotel staff.

The man followed me inside and was getting loud. Someone asked if I’d be willing to pay RM25 and I said yes, so the man tried to snatch the RM50 bill out of my hand but I was a taxi driver once (one night) and I’d been trained to hold my money tight and he had to peel out my change and give it to me. I gave him the RM50, he flipped me off and shouted some bad words and left, making more gestures and shoutings outside before driving away. Someone said it is customary to pay meter + 50% after midnight and I agreed, as it had been the same way in Singapore. The hotel manager introduced himself and apologized for the trouble and showed me that he had taken down the man’s taxicab number. That was the end of that but of course the incident was on my mind all the next day and Tampoka kept joking that he might be following us waiting for a good time to gun us down.

Tired as we were it still took a couple hours of showering and watching TV to get wound down for sleeping. I got my hotel reservations through Agoda.com which is supposed to include a big discount but I’d chosen the free breakfast option and was glad I did when we got downstairs at 7 a.m. and found a great smorgasborg of tasty Asian treats. The first one smelled bad so I only took a little, it turned out to be made with shrimp paste which Tampoka loved, it’s a Filipino favorite. There was some interesting chicken dishes but when I found the non-meat section I went hog wild as they had the eggy crepelike foods and dahl (curried lentils) that I had loved in Singapore and Tampoka hated. Filipino curry, like Vietnamese and Thai, is always made with coconut milk so she hates Indian curry. I figured, what the heck, it’s free so I better get my money’s worth, so I ate breakfast three times and had a couple cups of some very rich strong coffee, then we staggered up to our room and tried to sleep some more, but I can’t remember what came of that.

We were on the 15th floor of a 28 floor hotel attached to Mid Valley Megamall. Sounds real Asian doesn’t it. Well we can sleep in huts anytime we want, lots of our family and friends do at home. We enjoyed the air conditioning and hot shower. The room was nothing fancy but smelled good, had a safe we could program with our own combination, and almost everything worked. From the window we could see that the megamall was safely nestled in a tangle of freeways and we could count the floors of the megamall below, 4 or 5 plus we learned the utilitarian part—groceries and pharmacies and beer and stuff—was on a lower level.

This is compared to Singapore where we looked down from our hotel window on a red light alley lined with women sitting in plastic chairs outside rooms they could rent for an hour if someone wanted to get to know them better. That sort of thing is legal in Singapore but not in Malaysia, in Malaysia the view was freeways. I could see we weren’t going to be doing much walking outside of the mall.

(After a two-hour brownout and loss of part of this letter excusing the need for too much lunch in order to kill time…)

We had decided to visit the largest free-flight indoor birdpark in the world and enjoyed finding it with good instructions from the man at the hotel who was so helpful. Once we found it on the map we learned there was a planetarium next to it so we decided to do that instead, as Tampoka had been so thrilled with a previous experience in Singapore when we went to a 3-D theater. We asked more questions once we got off the subway to the part where we had to walk, since we had to walk past a place called the National Mosque to get there. A bus driver couldn’t figure out what I was talking about and that’s how I learned that “mosque” is pronounced MOS-KYEW as you might imagine if you hadn’t learned the word in the US.

A jogger informed us we were on the right road to the planetarium which was straight uphill in a nice park full of museums, and since it was a weekday afternoon I couldn’t figure out why the parking lots were all empty and nobody seemed to be around. Arriving at the path leading up to the planetarium we learned from a man reading a newspaper that it was actually 6:39 and the planetarium had closed at 4:30. No problem, we were hungry already since we skipped lunch so we walked back to the train after the museum police let me use their restroom and went one more stop back to the central station where we had to go past the dreaded bus terminal where are new friend the taxi driver wasn’t waiting for us, up around down and through and in and out to get to the other side of a street where we found the beginning and/or end of the monorail which we had to take to the place that I’d found to eat outside. I still don’t know what a monorail is, but this one seemed to ride on a concrete rail about two feet across, and unlike the real train it had a tendency to lean on curves. We thought that was exciting and soon found ourselves outside again studying maps in the terminal where a helpful man asked us if we had a problem and when I said where we were going, he told us to go over there and it was behind the KFC, that’s Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Sure enough, a whole street was more or less closed off to all traffic and we found what we’d been looking for: outdoor food like what we had subsisted on so cheaply in Singapore. Tampoka was famished and wanted to eat at the first place but I got her to hold off till we found a place called Tidy Thai and couldn’t walk any further. I studied the whole menu and ordered both dishes that contained no fish or prawns, and Tampoka ordered anything that had squid in it but ended up settling for the one with green beans and hot chilies. (At home she cooks it in its own ink, which kind of smells almost as bad as octopus cooked in its own ink, but this was not done that way, I tasted it and it was good.)

The cost of eating three entrees and a water and a coke was only about $23 so we were happy and overstuffed when we turned around and hot footed it back to the monorail. The area was well populated and full of shopping centers in big tall office buildings, just like the part of Singapore where we go when I need to see the inside of a Borders bookstore and pay $4 for a cup of west coast burned coffee. By the way, the places we go to in Singapore are not on a street blocked off for tourists, they are open all night for locals and tourists go there too. The difference is in the price, though Thai food was not easy to find in Singapore except in expensive malls.

So anyway I didn’t like all the parts of the walk between the monorail and the eating place so we just went back early and found ourselves back in the hotel in time to get a good night’s sleep. First we went to the lower floor of the megamall to buy some beer but I decided I didn’t want any and I forget what we did instead, but it must have involved a lot of sleeping.

Next day was slated for mall exploration, and by then we’d already given it a quick cruise through so I set her free to window shop and told her to find me in the big MPH bookstore in two or three hours whensover she should get bored. I bought a book on the petroleum industry and how powermongering and price fixing works and only made her wait about 20 minutes while I finished cruising the bookstore. We went upstairs where she ate her squid from the night before as we had been unable to finish our three Thai entrees, and I ate more tortilla things with dahl, and curry chicken. We had already checked out of the hotel and gave our bags to the helpful man at the hotel to keep for us, I think they called him a bellhop but to me he was just a very helpful man who saved me tons of miserable uncertainty. If not for him we’d have taken the train to the wrong airport instead of backtracking on the express bus to the budget terminal where we unknowingly had come in.

Tampoka was on the verge of getting pissed and I couldn’t figure out why so I finally ascertained or guessed that I’d made her wait too long for lunch, since I thought eating a double breakfast at the hotel should keep her happy for a very long time but maybe it didn’t. She was going to get a headache so decisive action was called for and against her will I marched her into the Coffee Bean in the mall, right next to where the hotel was. She is sensitive to caffeine so if she drinks coffee today she will have a headache tomorrow, and if it wasn’t too late I might be able to save the day. Learning that a cup of coffee was going to be RM7 or about three dollars, I marched her back out and back to the hotel restaurant instead since they’d never charged me for anything yet and I figured the coffee had to be downright reasonable.

Since we were going to save so much money on coffee I ordered ice cream to help wash it down and it was all very delicious, the coffee in the cute little cups which we’d guzzled freely from at breakfast, and when we were ready to go and went to pay it turned out the cute little coffees cost us about $5 each. Well OK, it was just for fun and it forstalled the headache.

At the last minute I decided that a trip to the ATM would help more than it would hurt as I was starting to stress about being cashless several thousand miles from home, and by then we had nothing to do but wander as slowly as a subway could take us toward the bus terminal one stop away and from there back to the airport on the bus where we waited patiently for about 6 hours and it was back to Manila. I was unconsious for the next several hours but I woke up long enough to change planes and get the highly coveted free one year visa (balikbayan pass) stamped in my visa, which I can only get by entering the Philippines with my Filipina wife. We had a nice wait between planes in Manila as it involved pizza by the slice of a quality that is not available where we live, and Tampoka got to tickle her taste buds with familiar food for the first time in three days.

Around 10 a.m. we got back to the Davao airport and since we were still friends we thought it would be wise to spend the day shopping for things we couldn’t afford to buy in Kuala Lumpur. One of the friends Tampoka made in the airport got hung for buying too much stuff, by that I mean she had to pay $50 to take her suitcase home unless she wanted to throw the heavy stuff out and put her giant teddy bear in the suitcase instead. We are smart, we travel light, and so tired enough to go home but not finished shopping, we spent the whole day mall crawling for certain items such as:

--an electric water pitcher so I don’t have to walk downstairs to make my coffee
--an egg poacher, which we couldn’t find (Tampoka had never tasted poached eggs before, now she wants to taste them all the time)
--real bedsheets as we’ve been sleeping on top of heavy bedspreads for five years and I won’t do it anymore as they are too hard to wash and get funky from children jumping on them; we are now the proud owners of two fitted sheets
--a blouse for Tampoka which she got for twelve dollars but would have had to pay 50 in KL
--a gear toy for DugDug which he loves, took it to bed with him last night ($2)
--a hooded t-shirt for DugDug, he’s been wanting one and she wanted to get some too-big shorts to go with it since they were the right color but I refused and that almost got her into a sulk so I helped her drag the department store and it paid off; we found a power rangers shirt and shorts which was the right color and it was just what the doctor ordered.
--who knows what else, tons of lunch no doubt.

Oh yeah, how could I forget. Tampoka wanted to eat at a certain wharf close to the mall we went to so when we got sat down there was an old man playing the guitar and singing 70s music. The Philippines is permanently stuck in the 70s as the personality of the Phils with its love of naïve romance and general lack of cynicism is compatible with the singer songwriter days. The singer eventually came to our table and Tampoka asked if it was OK, implying she would send him away if I didn’t want to pay him. I thought we should be nice to him as he was a pretty good performer, and he ended up doing a couple requests for her too. Tampoka had ordered enough food for five people so we ate enough for four people and gave him the rest, which he obviously enjoyed. He was well dressed or she wouldn’t have allowed it, but I asked her if I could give him some food and she thought it would be OK, and after a certain amount of urging he sat down and ate with us. The two of them talked about who knows what and that’s about the end of this report. Five years in the Philippines.

When we got home we had Rose call over to Bebeth’s house a mile away to bring DugDug home. While we waited we ate the cinnamon roll and pringles that we found in our backpacks, and listened to stories like:
--DugDug didn’t cry while we were gone
--DugDug said he wanted to stay with Mama Bebeth and not come home
--DugDug didn’t care to visit Manggahan in our absence but had cell phone conversations with his brother and sister, in which one of the topics of discussion was “who is DugDug’s real Mama and Papa.” DugDug assured his little brother that his real Mama and Papa is Luther and Tampoka.

That’s enough for now.