Well, we got in 30 minutes ahead of scheduled time of arrival and Jen was there to meet us, as I knew she would, despite the early hour – we landed at 5.25 am and as first flight of the day, there were no delays – we were through Immigration and with no Customs in sight, were through like a dose of salts.
Very little traffic on the M25 – at least going our way, away from the City - and a good deal of mist around, rendering the English countryside even better than usual at sunrise. I wished we were not on the Motorway – if we had been on secondary roads, we might have been able to stop and capture some of the sights. I’m still not sure why we dashed straight down to the hotel where we are spending tonight before boarding the liner tomorrow! We could have stopped in at Jen’s place to see her new kittens; we could have had a shower there to freshen up; we could have rambled down to Tilbury through the countryside on secondary roads. But we didn’t – and so we got to the hotel a little after seven – and of course since they were full last night there was no room available for us to check in – and the Eastern European lass on the desk with her limited grasp of English told me to come back after noon.
I’m not at my best trying to deal with poor customer focus after a 26 hour transit, so I didn’t rant or rave, merely went out to the car and sent in the Fixer – my dear Rab. She chatted away to the Manager who was very decent about it all – invited us to sit and have a coffee while they got a room ready. We were in by 9.00, had a shower and shave and I felt like a new man – albeit a little tired and old.
It didn’t take Rab and Jen long to head off for the nearest shopping centre – Lakeside – said to have had some accolade when it was built about 20 years ago – the biggest or the finest or…..well, it doesn’t seem to meet any such criteria now. It looks old and tired and compared to the enormous malls in Australia seemed to be lacking in atmosphere. I spent a fair bit of time sitting on the benches while the ladies shopped so I was able to observe the locals going about their business. There were not a lot of people around –it was mid-week – although there were clusters of women, many of them frighteningly large, with babies heading for all the toilets. They certainly seem to have been breeding like flies in this part of the country. There was ample evidence of the murder of the English language from simple errors such as the plural of foot being rendered as foots as in “There was foots and foots of snow last winter.”: and biggerer for something larger than big! I know that language has to mutate and develop and the English we speak now has little bearing on that in the centuries that have passed, but it is hard on the ear to hear this devolution.
The flight across was as good as all the flights with Malaysian Airlines have been. We were a bit concerned about the strike action to be taken by the Australian Customs and Quarantine people which was scheduled for yesterday morning so we got to the airport half an hour earlier than required. As it turned out the strike was for two hours between 7 am and 9 am, so the backlog was cleared by the time we got there at 11.30 and took off on time at 14.30.
We were in a new Airbus 330 but were not that impressed with the layout and amenities compared to the 747 or 777 aircraft we usually fly on. The forward toilets require a limbo dance ability for someone my height to get close enough to avoid missing the pan. They are built into the nose of the aircraft where the roof slopes in quite sharply. Getting into the toilets also required me to slip in sideways as the passages and doorways are too narrow for my shoulders to fit through. Clearly not built with men my size in mind. The seats do convert to flatter beds, but are not quite as comfortable as the 747/777 beds, being a little shorter and slightly narrower. Not that I’m complaining because I had a couple for good hour’s sleep during the eight hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Between sleeping we had the satays with peanut sauce which are the Malaysian Airlines signature dish and an excellent meal of curried fish.
The three hour wait in Kuala Lumpur went by swiftly and we were soon on our way just after midnight, this time in a 747 with the older, more comfortable seats, and after another round of satays and an excellent lamb shank, we turned out the lights and slept like logs for more than four hours. Of course that left us with about 8 or 9 hours to go on our 12+ hours leg to London so we watched a couple of shows before having another snooze. I had about 7 hours sleep altogether – enough to keep me going until 10.30 tonight. As we were served breakfast at 40,000 feet having travelled over 6,000 miles from Kula Lumpur with 1,000 miles to go, I couldn’t help but wonder, as I often do when we are travelling, how casually we take this amazing ability to cover such enormous distances in such a short time – at relatively little cost. It would have taken my ancestor Dutch East India Company captain more than 6 months to get to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam and just as long to get back on a journey full of danger and risk.
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