A visit to the Big Smoke

It was decided that all of us Fellows needed to meet and talk about how our project is progressing. So arrangements were made to bring us all into "the Big Smoke" (Kuala Lumpur) from our various outlying posts (two teams are on the other island part of Malaysia in Sabah and Sarawak) and put us up in a (fairly) swank hotel for a couple of days.

Minor Hassles

Our little bags were all packed ready for our two days away (cheap airline only allows carry-on baggage), and it was already dark when we rode down the lift to the the car park in our building.

We stared at our (rental) car for a moment, parked in our allocated space at the very end of the parking area.

At first we thought it was the wrong car, then we thought we might have gone over a bump and lost our number plate ... um both number plates! Someone had stolen our number plates! Nothing we could do about it, we were on our way to the airport.

Fun at the Airport!

Our fellow Fellow, Lloyd, has been having trouble with a sore leg, so the whole airport thing (miles of walking, especially in regional airports where you walk out to the plane and climb the stairs) was promising to be a bit of a pain.

To Lloyd's amusement, and amid a great deal of hilarity, we found a wheelchair for him in the local airport, and then booked him one to get through the (huge) airport in Kuala Lumpur at the other end. It certainly added some fun to the whole trip.

The Twin Towers

Kuala Lumpur's "Twin Towers" are well known - they used to be the tallest in the world.

We came in from Kuala Terengganu late at night, and there were the towers outside our hotel window.

The next day (and the next!) was full of meetings ...

... very worthwhile and useful meetings, in fact. At the end of the day we headed out for a walk down the road and went shopping in the Twin Towers shopping centre.

Heading back in time for our Fellows dinner at the hotel, we found that the daily afternoon thunderstorm had arrived, and our short walk had to be replaced with a taxi-ride. There was, of course, a big crowd of people trying to catch taxis. A lady was selling tickets for 2 ringgits (about 60c) to get a taxi, and we noticed that anyone that didn't buy one was just pushed aside as taxis arrived ... so yes,we bought a ticket to get into the taxi queue.

Back Home

Sometimes in our lifestyle it's hard to know just what/where "home" is. The trip was worthwhile and interesting, but little old Kuala Terengganu certainly felt like home as we fell into bed back in our sea-view apartment here.