Tuesday, May 3, 2022
5:23 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
Today is the day for the vaccination clinic. I’ve gotten confirmation from other people that a vaccination clinic really does take place today. Someone found information online that says this clinic happens on the first and third Tuesday of every month starting at one in the afternoon. My plan is to be there at noon just to make sure. And my plan is to bring my GoPro with me and record the event. I was just thinking this morning that since I’ll be walking to the hospital again, I could find another new street in Mae Sot to walk down to get there. I haven’t looked at Google Maps yet to plot my route, but I’ll do that this morning.
I’m a bit at a loss once again to account for my day yesterday. I remember that I watched a few YouTube videos from all the travel vloggers that are returning to Malaysia. I wrote a bit about my impressions of those videos. I also watched the latest and newest video from Ken Abroad. The video was the full story of his first day back in Malaysia, and because of that, it felt quite familiar to me. It starts with him waking up at his hotel at the airport and having breakfast there. Over breakfast, he told the story of leaving his camera bag in the airport taxi and then trying to get it back. Poor guy. It sounds like something that would happen to me. He had the long and tiring day of flying from Sri Lanka to Malaysia, and then because he knew he would be arriving late and would be tired, he made what he thought was a smart decision to stay at a relatively expensive hotel at the airport. But then this hotel ended up being at a completely different airport terminal. He takes a taxi from one terminal to the other one. And finally, he can rest in his hotel room. But then he realizes that he doesn’t have his camera bag with him. He checks his video, and he realizes that he left it in the taxi. And he has to leave his hotel in the wee hours of the morning and retrace his steps back to the first terminal and track down the taxi company and the taxi driver. He is successful in that, and he gets his camera bag back. He’s happy about that, of course, but it means that he didn’t get to enjoy his hotel room as much as he had hoped.
Next, he had to get from the airport to downtown Kuala Lumpur to his Airbnb. He tried to take a Grab, but he said they kept cancelling on him. A Grab was going to cost 65 ringgit ($15 US). So he decided to take a taxi instead, and that cost 85 ringgit ($20 US). If I was willing to pay that much, I’d probably have taken the high speed train to KL Sentral instead. That would be more interesting, and if I remember right, it cost 55 ringgit. But, of course, I’d almost certainly have taken the bus instead. I think a bus costs 11 ringgit, and that takes you right to KL Sentral. It’s fast and convenient. But it’s a different world these days. People take a Grab or an Uber to their reserved Airbnb condo. Even relatively low-budget backpackers do that. My usual pattern would be to take the airport bus to KL Sentral and then walk or take public transportation to a cheap hostel from there.
The other thing he needed to do was get his covid test. At that time, Malaysia still required a pre-departure fancy test and a rapid test within 24 hours after arrival. He checked at the airport, and they told him that this test would cost 260 ringgit. I’m pretty sure he got the incorrect information. I checked online, and that is the price of the more expensive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. He only needed to get the Antigen Rapid Test (RTK-AG), and that costs 160 ringgit. In the video, Ken said that he heard that the test cost 100 ringgit, but that is the price of the RTK-AG test for Malaysians. For foreigners, it is 160 ringgit.
In any event, Ken decided it was too expensive, and he made plans to get it done more cheaply at a local hospital. But when he tried to do that, he ran into all kinds of problems. In fact, his adventures started to sound more and more like the things that always happen to me. He tracked down a local hospital nearby and went there, but the hospital appeared to be empty and abandoned. He found another one, but they didn’t do that kind of testing there. His search for a covid test turned into a quest that took a good chunk of the day. He eventually found a friendly clinic at a hospital, and they charged him 35 ringgit ($8 US). That’s so much cheaper than at the airport. Even if he got the right price at the airport of 160 ringgit, that’s still nearly five times higher. That’s kind of crazy.
The taxi he booked took him right to his Airbnb apartment. He went for quite a nice place in a big tower called Ceylonz Suites in Bukit Bintang. He must be earning a good income from YouTube, because this was a modern building with an infinity swimming pool, gym, and all the other fancy stuff you’d expect. He said he booked it for two nights to check it out, and if he liked it, he would extend his stay. It cost 120 ringgit ($27.50 US) per night. It’s not my kind of place, of course. I dislike those empty neighborhoods. I’d rather be in a small place in a more active neighborhood. And, of course, it would be too expensive for me.