Bleary eyed Saturday

We arrive in Kuala Lumpur 7 hours and 30 minutes later, which was 5:20am local time.

None of us had had any sleep and the three of us are looking quite bleak.

It’s dark but already the temperature in the high 20’s,

Emma has a small smile on her face as she found it impossible to warm up whilst we were flying.

KL has a transit train system similar to Tokyo's Narita, which impressed me,

Here are my traveling companions modelling the waiting area on one end of the transit train.

We wander around one of the large wings of KL Airport, which was mainly closed, and end up in Starbucks. 

I have a problem with the lack of ethics Starbucks have exhibited and practice towards the peasant coffee growers of the world but for today I have sold out. Extreme tiredness will do that.

Aside from the lack of ethics their coffee also lacks good taste. 

Yet more proof that if you market something well you will gather a following.

Free wifi helps too.

After a while of sitting around I got bored so I decided to start playing with my Joby camera stand. Thought of being an exra in the next Mad Max extravaganza came to mind.

Here is a display that some of you might appreciate. I know my manager, Steve Riley, certainly would.. They are scale models but I'm not sure what scale though.

  

We spent four hours in KL Airport and at around 09:30am, local time, we finally boarded our flight to Hanoi.

Business class on this flight has sixteen seats and three of them are ours. Woohoo! Money well spent, especially after a sleepless night.

Lunch is predictably a choice of Malay dishes and I chose Nasi Lemak, which was very spicy. Unfortunately I had forgotten to inform the airlines that Emma is a vegan, so her choices are quite limited. In fact all there was, was fruit.  

You can see she here she is less than impressed, but at least she has some comfort and space to be so.

Here is the passenger in 1A. It doesn't get any closer to the pointy end of the plane than that.

We breezed through customs without any bag checks or even scans, which I found quite surprising. The cab driver was there to pick us up as expected so it was a completely fuss free exit from the airport.

The drive into Hanoi revealed that much of the infrastructure has changed since I was here last, some six years ago. The whole place looks fresher and cleaner. 

What has not changed, and I could tell that Tiz and Emma were not so comfortable with, was the traffic.

It is still insane. All the car drivers here think they are driving BMW's, which means that they are exempt from using indicators nor are they required to use just one lane at a time as they meander at the speed limit minus 20kph from one place to another.

It made me laugh.

Our poor driver fell victim to the weird address of the place we are staying at. The address shows one street but the entrance, with the signage, is actually on another street. He was calm and good natured about it but it took a while for him to figure it out. 

After arriving we found out that the Americans and their damned tipping culture have well and truly ruined this place too. Both the less than effective cab driver and the porter, that initially took us to an occupied room, hung around obviously waiting for tips. I DON'T THINK SO! 

I really dislike the whole concept of the client being made responsible for maintaining a reasonable standard of living for the workers, therefore increasing the profits for the employer, but being made to feel as if you are obligated to reward poor service really pisses me off. Rant over.

Once we settled in to our apartment we headed over the road to the Lotte Mart, which is a large and quite varied supermarket.

We had a ball. Everything was so cheap. Three large rice paper rolls for AU$1.50, a six pack of 330ml Tiger beer for AU$5,  and the bargains just went on. Another great thing is that they prepare and cook food in front of you. It's a very different way of doing things, and in my eyes much better, to 0ur way.  

We'll be returning to this very handy supermarket a lot. 

Below is the docket. It may not mean much to most of you but I have include it for those that are familiar with Vietnam.  Whilst I am writing this I had a chuckle to myself thinking about what those "familiar with Vietnam people" must be thinking. It's probably "Wow, those prices are so expensive!". My response is "It's all relative and given we are are from a truly lucky country the prices are just fine."

  

I wrote this entry at 06:30pm on Easter Saturday night from the 11th floor apartment overlooking Hanoi. 

We'd been up 36 hour and were just so overtired we couldn't be bothered sleeping and we'd finished our dinner of rice paper rolls so it would have been unwise to go to bed on a full stomach.

Thankfully the excellent broadband speeds seemingly available everywhere have made it easy to grab a few TV shows and a movie or two to watch as we meandered off to zzzzzzzland.