Christmas time trip to four countries

[Big Boy]

A very big palace to only have 2 rooms open.

I like the message on the Starbucks? coffee. Did they know you, or did everybody get a message

[Bamboo Grove]

BigBoy wrote:

Did they know you, or did everybody get a message

Everybody got a message, my friend got "Happy New Year, Mike." They asked our names when we made the order. Obviously my name was somewhat strange to them so the spelling wasn't exactly correct.

[Bamboo Grove]

Return

On New Year’s Eve’s morning I had a transfer booked to the airport at 9.00. Before that I had breakfast with my friend, then we said our goodbyes and I left for the airport. This was the flight, I didn’t want to be delayed as I had just three hours in KL, and I couldn't get a transfer ticket. The flight was delayed about 40 minutes, but I calculated that it might just leave me enough time to go through the immigration, pick up my luggage, go to the check-in and then again through the immigration.

The airport had been crowded on the day of my arrival to Malaysia but luckily on this day it seemed to be fairly empty. I got through the first immigration checks fairly quickly and also got my luggage without any delays.

When I got to the automatic check-in, the machine told me that I had to go to the manual check-in. There were some queues there, but I thought I would have quite enough time. When I got my boarding pass, I was told to go and get another luggage check-in sticker from the machine. Then when I was ready, I headed for the immigration. The immigration’s machine couldn’t read my boarding pass, and they told me to go back to the manual check-in to get another card. Now I started getting a bit nervous as my last flight back to Macau was leaving on time. The only flight on time out of my six flights. The gate of my flight was at the very end of the airport, and I arrived there when boarding was already on the way. Anyway, I managed to arrive on time.

The flight home was uneventful, luckily, I had preordered some food, nothing delicious but as I had not had anything since breakfast, it had been a good decision.

lento 1.jpg (54.43 KiB) Viewed 1993 times

lento 2.jpg (49.95 KiB) Viewed 1993 times

Thoughts:
My main aim was not to see that many sights but to see how the world goes by in these cities and of course to see my friend for the first time in 18 years. I was hoping to hear more Tai Lue language in Jinghong, but I should have gone to the villages where the Dais live and I didn’t feel like spending a lot of time going to this kind of tourist trips.

Luang Prabang reminded me of Thailand of old, but it was quite touristy.

Malacca was nice and I enjoyed the riverside bars and restaurants.

Medan was nothing special, lot of cars, pollution and traffic jams but it was interesting to see a bit of Indonesia as well.

Planes: Although all my six flights were comfortable for these relatively short distances, five of them 1-2 hours, one 4 hours, five of them were delayed by 40-60 minutes. Five of them were AirAsia and one China Southern.

Train: I had wanted to do this train trip since I heard about it. It went smoothly but it was mainly in tunnels so not much of seeing any scenery. It took one hour on both of the borders, Chinese and Laotian. It cost around 40 USD.

Taxis from Kuala Lumpur to Malacca and return: Both ways good drivers and good cars, trips went smoothly.

Airport transfers in Jinghong and Medan: No complaints here either.

The Didi app for taxis in China is excellent. Used it for the first time in Jinghong and I have now used it in Zhuhai as well. The costs have been just a couple of Euros, the most expensive for a 15 km. trip in Zhuhai was about 4 Euros.

[PeteC]

Really enjoyed that BG. Thanks for taking the time and effort to put it all together and publish it.