Sunday, February 19, 2023
7:28 a.m. Room 607 Nan Yeang Hotel
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
I’ve been wanting to finish this story for a long time, but I seem to have very little time each day. Let me try again.
It’s interesting to wake up in Kuala Lumpur after my two months in Sumatra, particularly waking up in this hotel. There are no mosques in my immediate neighborhood, and therefore, there is no early morning call to prayer to wake me up over and over. There is also an hour time difference, and that means that it is much darker in the morning. I was surprised to look out the window at seven this morning and find the world still completely dark. The level of light was the same as it would have been at six in the morning in Sumatra, which is before sunrise.
Despite this, and despite going to bed quite early and remaining in bed for a long time each night, I wake up tired. My whole body simply feels heavy and difficult to move. My eyes are also tired as soon as I open them. It feels like the end of the day rather than the beginning. I don’t know why this should be. I should be leaping out of bed full of energy. An interesting note is that I dropped by the Cojoy Hotel to touch base with the people there, and while I was there, I got my Samsung Galaxy Watch out of my backpack. I decided to bring it with me to Sumatra to see if it gives me some interesting data about my bike rides. I didn’t do much with it when I had the watch before, and I’m now slowly learning about some of the things it can do.
One ability it has is to track sleep patterns. I don’t know how it does this, but if I wear the watch during the night, it provides a breakdown of the night. This data is transferred to the Samsung Health app on my phone. And this morning, I can see in this data that I was in bed for eight hours and ten minutes. My actual sleep time, however, was six hours and forty-five minutes, but much of that doesn’t appear to be actual restful sleep. I was lying awake in bed on eight separate occasions for a total of one hour and nineteen minutes. It feels much longer than that to me.
The sleeping time is broken down into twenty minutes of deep sleep, four hours and twenty-two minutes of light sleep, and two hours and nine minutes of REM sleep. In terms of percentage, it looks like this:
Awake: 16%
REM sleep: 26%
Light sleep: 54%
Deep sleep: 4%
I have no idea if this is a normal sleep pattern but it does seem like a lot of being awake or in a light sleep. Only 4% of the time was I in deep sleep. Perhaps this is why I feel tired in the morning. Perhaps I don’t get enough actual deep sleep. My sense is that during much of that light sleep, I was essentially awake, not really sleeping at all. When I get out of bed in the morning, my memory is of lying in bed, tossing and turning for much of the night.
The watch and the app also keep track of my steps. I know that this is a common thing for people these days. People are always talking about their steps and “getting in their steps.” But it’s somewhat new to me. The app tells me that on Friday, I took 10,060 steps, and on
Saturday, I took 9,914 steps. It also tracks my heart rate, and it tells me that my heart rate ranges from 50 to 150 beats per minute.
I also downloaded an app called Ride with GPS. I hope to use it to keep track of any cycling days back in Sumatra. It provides a map of where I went plus a breakdown of distances and a chart of elevation gain and loss. I wish I had had something like that operating when I rode from Dumai to Bukittinggi. There are probably some other very interesting and useful apps out there. I should poke around and see what else is out there.
However, to go back to my story, I left off when I was still sitting in the departures area at the Padang airport and waiting for the Air Asia check-in desks to open. I sat in one of the massage chairs for a few minutes and got a painful massage. Then I moved to a chair that was close to a Vivo charging station. I charged up my main phone to 100% just to make sure that I had enough power to get me through the rest of the trip. While I was hanging out, I passed the time by watching a nearby luggage-wrapping operation. It was very popular, and a steady stream of people dropped off various suitcases and other bags to be wrapped up and sealed in thin blue plastic. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this could be, particularly if you have a suitcase that can be locked. However, it was satisfying to watch the suitcases go around and around on the platform while the machine wrapped it up in plastic. The men running this operation had clearly developed skills doing this. A newcomer would probably fiddle and falter and be very slow and make lots of mistakes. But these guys had experience and it was a pleasure to watch them work. They made it look easy.
When I first entered the departures area, I noticed a large group of schoolgirls sitting on the floor near the international check-in counters. I guessed that they would be on my flight, and that turned out to be the case. When the Air Asia counters opened, this group was herded by their teachers or guides or chaperones through the check-in process. They kind of took over the whole area. And as luck would have it, my chosen seat – 25D – was smack in the middle of this group on the plane. I felt bad for the girls sitting around me. I don’t think their dream for this trip was to have a large, scary foreigner like me sitting near them, let alone right beside them. They were very quiet, I must say. A similar group of American or Canadian schoolgirls on a big international trip would likely have been quite raucous. But these Indonesian girls sat quietly and barely moved or spoke for the entire flight.
I had had no trouble dropping off my bag and checking in for my flight and getting my boarding pass. And after I did that, I was free to move through the next level of security and go to the departures area. However, even there, I ran into a barrier. I had hoped to be able to go through immigration right away and go all the way to my exact departure gate. I wanted to get the formalities over with and then I could finally relax with a cup of coffee. But this airport wasn’t organized that way. Most of the departure gates were for domestic flights. My Air Asia flight was the only international flight scheduled for that afternoon and evening, and because of that, immigration wasn’t even open or staffed. It was simply blocked off and wouldn’t open until just before the flight. And that ended up taking a long time, because my flight was delayed by over an hour. Given that I had arrived at the airport so early and my flight was delayed and I couldn’t move through the system right away, I felt like I was just hanging out in the airport in limbo for a very long time. It wasn’t terrible, though. I had my meal of mie ayam bakso and spent my time people-watching in the check-in area. Then I had a nice cup of coffee and a tasty muffin in the domestic departures lounge. There were a lot of restaurants and shops and cafes there. All of them were expensive, but there were enough of them to cater to any taste.
And then at long, long last, my flight was announced, and I was able to move through immigration and go to the actual departure lounge for my flight. It turned out that it was lucky that I was prevented from going through immigration early. Had I done so, I would have been trapped in this lounge where there was nothing. All the coffee shops and restaurants and shops were on the other side of immigration in the domestic flights area. There was nothing in the international departures lounge. There were just seats and a bathroom and a children’s play area.
The flight itself was uneventful. It was only an hour and ten minutes long. I was sitting amongst the schoolgirls, as I mentioned. Because of that, I felt I couldn’t continue watching the Spanish horror film “The Platform”, which I had started in the airport. It was too gruesome for the girls around me. Instead, I loaded up Downton Abbey’s latest movie. That felt safe to be watching with all these young girls around me glancing at my tablet screen. I had pre-ordered a sandwich as a meal, and I enjoyed that quickly before the plane landed in Kuala Lumpur.
My arrival in KL also went smoothly. The immigration area was not the madhouse that I had seen on previous trips. It felt quite empty. There were perhaps a hundred other foreigners ahead of me in the single line. It was a lot of fun for me to see the sudden explosion of foreigners with a large variety of clothing styles and hairstyles. Even seeing hair on women felt new and fresh. I had gotten accustomed to women’s hair being covered up in Sumatra. And to suddenly see so much hair of different colors and arranged in different styles was fascinating. For me, even seeing the Air Asia flight attendants was a bit of a shock. Flight attendants for Air Asia are hired to a certain extent for their appearance. They tend to be young and slim and attractive, and they take a lot of care with their makeup and hairstyles. And the uniform is somewhat revealing. It hugs their bodies tightly and includes a fairly short skirt that shows a substantial amount of leg. After two months of life in Sumatra, seeing these flight attendants in their bright red outfits was quite something.
I didn’t have trouble with immigration. The officer barely looked at me. He stamped me into the country with the usual 90-day social visit pass, and then I was free to go. After that, I picked up my luggage. My careful packing job with the rope had started to come apart, but it was hanging in there just enough that I was able to hoist my floppy bag under my arm and carry it around without too much trouble. I also picked up a SIM card along the way. I had gotten a Celcom SIM in Penang on my most recent trip to Malaysia. And I had hoped to use that same SIM card, but I misplaced it. I think I put it somewhere safe in my luggage, but I couldn’t remember where that safe place was. To replace it, I stopped at a Digi counter. I’d heard good things about Digi. I didn’t make a big deal about trying to get the best SIM with the best package for me. I just went with whatever SIM and whatever data package they were advertising. It was some kind of tourist SIM with 30 gigabytes of data good for 30 days. I didn’t think I would need that much data for this trip, but getting that SIM seemed to be the path of least resistance. The man at the Digi desk installed it for me and he got it up and running in a very short time. The equivalent process at Telkomsel in Indonesia took an hour to an hour and a half. The guy at this Digi counter did it in what felt like two minutes. Once I had the SIM, I sent some messages to Jamie and to Daryl to announce my arrival.
Having gone through this airport many times, it was an easy matter for me to walk through it to the area with the buses to KL Sentral. I got a ticket for 15 ringgit, and I was on the bus heading downtown within half an hour. My seatmate was a friendly man from Japan, and I had a pleasant conversation with him all the way to KL Sentral. Once I arrived at KL Sentral, I began a small adventure involving my beloved Touch’nGo card. I went through a lot of trouble and effort in Kuala Lumpur last time to get a Touch’nGo card and set it up with my eWallet. But after all that, I forgot to bring it with me to Malaysia this time. Or at least I thought I did. I remembered exactly where I put it in my luggage, and I reminded myself on several occasions to make sure to bring it to Malaysia. And in the end, I forgot all about it. And I found myself at KL Sentral having to get a token at one of the machines. And that turned into a big hassle. The machines I tried to use wouldn’t work. Then I went to the counter, and the man there was sound asleep. And when I woke him up, he wouldn’t sell me a token. He just waved me towards some new token machines. And those wouldn’t work either. I had to keep moving down the bank of machines until I finally found one that would work. It was annoying, and I kicked myself for forgetting to bring the Touch’nGo card. And this pattern continued on into the next two days. I rode the MRT a lot, and I had to buy a token each time, and I ran into a problem with the machines each time. And then, on the third day here, I happened to be rummaging through my wallet to sort out some receipts and currency and other bits of paper, and I found the Touch’nGo card conveniently tucked into a slot. In fact, I HAD gotten this card and put it into my wallet as I prepared for and packed for this trip. But then I FORGOT that I had done so. I was smart enough to bring the card. But then I was so dumb that I then forgot that I had brought it. I seem to do things like that all the time now.
My time in Kuala Lumpur feels like it has gone by in a rush, and I haven’t gotten a lot done. My biggest goal was to finish editing all the video that I shot in my last few days in Sumatra so that when I return, I can start fresh. But I’ve hardly had any time to do that. That’s partially because I’ve been meeting up with people a fair bit. On the first day, I got together with Matthew. We met at the One Utama Mall and had dinner and coffee and did some shopping. On that day, I also dropped by the Cojoy Hotel to touch base with them. I didn’t sleep well at all that first night, and I was exhausted that first day, and I got very little done. The next morning, I met Daryl and Jamie for an early breakfast at Yut Kee. I had a full chicken chop meal and then I had a full pork chop meal on top of that. I had eaten very little during my trip to Kuala Lumpur and on my first day here. So I was starving. And then the next morning, yesterday, I met Jamie again for coffee. After coffee, I went to a bike shop and finally found a tire patch kit. I bought two of them. I just happened to be near Yut Kee again, and I stopped there for a chicken chop lunch. Somewhere in there, I went on a shopping trip to the big supermarket at KL Sentral, and I stocked up on coffee and creamer and corn flakes. And I also spent time organizing for my return to Sumatra.
This return trip is turning out very well. I’ve stayed in regular contact with Adi, the man who helped me store my bicycle at his family’s house on the volcano near Bukittinggi. Before I left, he told me that he had plans to drive back to Padang, and if my return coincided with his trip, I could fly into Pekanbaru (instead of Padang) and ride with him to Bukittinggi in his car. I loved that idea. I would get to experience the entire road that I had cycled from Pekanbaru to Bukittinggi, but from the comfort of the passenger seat of an SUV. It would be great to spend a day with Adi on the road. When we first discussed this idea, it seemed most likely that Adi would be returning in two weeks or more. But for work reasons, his schedule moved up, and he told me that he would be driving back much sooner than that. And since I’ve been finding Kuala Lumpur to be quite expensive this time around, I didn’t mind the idea of leaving sooner. And I really missed the atmosphere of Sumatra. I realized that I wanted to return as soon as possible, and I quickly booked a flight that would get me into Pekanbaru the day before Adi leaves. And Adi offered to not only pick me up at the airport but let me stay at his family’s house that night. Everything seems to be coming together nicely. The end result is that I will have been in Kuala Lumpur for just one week. And that is fine with me. The only downside to that is that I’m having trouble doing any video editing. I’m hoping to get a chunk of that done today and tomorrow, which are essentially my last two days here.
A bunch of time on this visit also went into some other errands. One morning, I went to Maybank and cashed some travellers checks. That got me a stack of Malaysian ringgit. And then I went to KL Sentral to change those into Indonesian rupiah at my usual money changer. However, that money changer had disappeared. And I decided to continue on to the MidValley Megamall to look for Teva sandals. Just like previous times, I had a lot of trouble finding the Teva shop there, but I eventually found it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t happy with any of their sandals. I tried on everything they had in stock, and I didn’t really like any of them. They didn’t fit or feel right. And I was reluctant to spend 300 to 400 ringgit on sandals unless they felt absolutely perfect.
Luckily, Daryl dropped by. He happened to be in the neighborhood, and he needed to buy slippers for household use. And he took me to the nearby Bata store. He got his slippers there, and Bata just happened to have some sandals on display. I tried on a pair, and they were great. I couldn’t believe it. They cost 89 ringgit and were far more comfortable than any of the Tevas. And I think the build quality is just as good. So I finally found some half decent sandals at a decent price. And so far, they appear to be the perfect size. My horrible oversized department store sandals are going straight into the bin where they belong. And after buying the slippers and sandals, Daryl and I went to his usual money-changing place at that mall, and we both changed money for our respective upcoming trips.
I suppose I could go into the details of all these experiences and tell the full story of what happened, but I really don’t have time for that. All I have time for is this bare bones version. Today is Sunday. I hope to do a bunch of video editing today. I’ll be here in KL on Monday as well. And on Tuesday afternoon, I fly back to Sumatra. I don’t have much time left here at all.