Monday – KL to Adelaide

This will be my last entry of the travel diary, and it’ll be a fairly short one, so I may have to apply a little double or triple space action between the lines to pad it out. But I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and thanks for doing so.

Landing in KL saw us check into our last hotel, eat our last buffet meal and do the last of our bartering. And barter we did! We all thought we’d rid ourselves of the last little bits of Ringgit (Malaysian local currency) by hitting up the Chinatown markets for the last time. The competition was on to see who could get the worst pair of sunglasses and wear them around. Robert Shirley knew he was onto a good thing when he picked up a pair and asked how much they were. Shirls, as usual got the price of RM30 as the initial offer, but when he lay down his seemingly unrealistic first offer of RM5 (about $1.60 in Australia), the vendor instantly took the opportunity to offload the fashion travesties. Other contenders for the mantle of worst sunnies were Simon Goodwin who purchased what could only be described as safety goggles and Ivan Maric whose imitation Oakleys reminded us of the depths of early 90s fashion.

Later on, Scott ‘Alf’ Stevens and I decided we’d go to the Petronas Towers in KL city so we felt like we’d done some proper sightseeing. These buildings used to be the two tallest in the world, twins, which stand at around 90 storeys high, with a viewing ramp which runs between them on the 40th floor. And although after seeing the Burj Al Arab in Dubai (180-odd storeys and 800m high), it didn’t look quite as impressive as its days of lofty superiority, one thing did strike me about the towers – they looked like the most climbable building in the world. Each floor’s exterior has a number of extremely graspable metal bars protruding from them and it was hard to resist the childhood temptation to scale upwards and yell out, “Mum, Mum, look how high I am. Mum, loooook!” (To which Mum would reply “well done, honey” without raising her head from her Colin Thiele novel). You wouldn’t need to be a ‘human fly’ to climb it, a curiously adventurous toddler whose parents are facing the other way could find themselves five-storeys up without even trying.

But as we returned to the airport for the last time, I reflected on how good a trip it was and how fascinating it is to see different countries and cultures and how they operate. Particularly how they sometimes utilise English translations, ‘buzz words’ or phrases incorrectly (Like the supermarket ‘Cold Storage – The Fresh Food People’, which Stevo and I thought was quite a contradiction of terms). The best example of this is the unnecessary and sometime baffling use of the letter Z in some of the airport stores’ names to make them sound ‘cooler’ to kids. The best examples I saw were Toy Paradize, Choizes (?) and the utterly pointless Kidz Playgroundzz. And on the topic of Z’s, we all look forward to catching a few as we make our last stretch towards Adelaide. I and everyone had a great time, but I was ready for a home cooked meal, my own bed and some Vegemite. You’ve got to feel for Patrick Dangerfield who had to fly straight back to Melbourne and start year 12 on Wednesday – he’ll be full of beans I’m certain.

Over and out,

Nick Gill #1