Selamat tinggal KL

We schlepped out to Brisbane Airport at midnight on Monday, in pouring rain, and wearing both pullover and overcoat. It seemed like good preparation for winter in Poland (just a teensy nod to Mel Brooks there). But KL in August is Brisbane in November. Aside from the five starness of my hotel it's an awful lot like home: hot, and overgrown with fan palms. Weirdly my room even enjoys the same sound effects that I have at Chez Wilson Street, a kind of clattering noise which means my snake is in residence for the day. But I’m assuming level 19 of the Hotel Istana is free of serpents.




Anyway it’s gloriously wonderful to loaf around in a bed the size of ship’s cabin after hours and hours wedged into a tiny airline seat where my knees reach the person in front of me. My Gen Y neighbour at one point slept like a contortionist, with her legs tucked together on the opened tray table in front of her. She also engaged in some highly charged phone calls involving quite a bit of loud sobbing, up to the point where we were taxi-ing into the sky. It was all an invitation to eavesdrop but there wasn't enough disclosure to piece together the whole story. Something about a friend 'pissing her off'.




I’m staying very near two important things. The first is the monorail . Like Homer I love the monorail. When I’m on it I can see exactly where I am in relation to the major point of the city (the huge convention centre shopping mall, the Petronas towers, and various wonderful parks and gardens). The second is Bukit Bunding, a vast undercover market of knock-offs and cheap stuff for Malaysians. Their cheap stuff is so much more interesting than our cheap stuff, especially the clothing. I’m hugely tempted to buy one of those silk outfits the men wear which are like gaudy pyjamas with a table-cloth wrapped around the hips (called the Baju Melayu I think). Spending the day in silk pyjamas seems like a great advance on the business suit. And I love the cool hat.



Maintaining a servant free lifestyle in the normal course of things as I do it was embarrassing to come home last night and find a couple of young men restoring order to the floor and rearranging my higgledy piggledy heap of clothing and jars. One had thoughtfully placed a frangipanni on the turned down bed and a pair of hotel slippers by the night-table, all wasted on a frumpy Aussie sheila like moi.

This time around in KL I haven’t seen all the cosmetic surgery tourists I saw last time, roaming the streets like the ‘quarter-vegies’ (sic) in Peter Weir’s hilarious film ‘The cars that ate Paris.’ It was all downhill from there for Pete, in spite of the world fame that followed. Being tall, female, travelling alone and ‘old’ makes me feel fairly visible in Malaysia which seems a culturally conservative kind of place, in spite of its diverse influences and history. In Seoul it was worse. I felt as though everywhere I walked a spotlight was trained on me, like David Bowie. But Malaysia is a charming shambles, where things often seem on the verge of getting totally out of control. The street works are almost as bad as Brisbane’s, footpaths suddenly drop without warning, or even cease upon the hour.

When I arrived my driver didn’t show up for another hour. He'd slept in apparently. Then we pulled into a service station where he mumbled he’d be back ‘in a while’, and left with the engine running and the lights on:



After a while I photographed his empty seat, having grown a trifle bored with the sunrise, and in spite of the visitation of a Big Mac UFO.