Kuala Lumpur, Again!

7 March 2009

We spent our last week in Thailand, and stayed on the same beach for a week. Quite frankly, there isn’t much to say except that we relaxed and we cleaned the wombat thoroughly. It was great. Oh, and we finally did something with the surfboard. As suggested by Patricia, we turned it into a form of Art. A big mosaic with the name of the bar where we slept. All it took was three colours of electric tape, scissors, patience and a little creativity! It took about 4 hours but turned out really nice, we were quite proud.

On the last day of our visa, we made a dash for the border, and came into quite heavy rain. We said goodbye to the year 2552 in Thailand and came back to 2009 in Malaysia! We made it to Malaysia without any worries, and drove on the perfect highways towards KL. We were both surprised in the ease with which we passed customs and immigration! We made a overnight stop on a highway rest place, which was clean and quaint, and then drove on to KL. In KL, our first stop was at our friend Stiven’s 4x4 shoppe, and he let us borrow his GPS with the KL map to run our errands, which was quite nice of him! We were having fun by changing the voices and languages on the device. We put it in French Canadian, and there was even Luxembourgish! “Lenks ofbeien!” We spent the night in the KL hills.

The next day, we ran more errands, and got everything ready for shipping the wombat to Chennai. Unfortunately, by then I was sick again, I think I ate some bad seafood, but hey, it’s part of the joys and woes of travelling!

We slept our last night for a week in the wombat, at Stiven’s brothers’ workshop with two cute guard dogs who were happy for the company!

Yesterday morning, we left for port Klang, collected a 250 RM deposit the port still owed me, and drove to the agent that is taking care of the shipping. Mr Abul was very friendly (and MC found him quite stylish in his fuschia shirt.) Again, nothing too exciting happened, but we like it that way when we’re dealing with shipping! The car was driven in the container, lashed and locked without a problem! In the container yard, we met two other overlanders travelling in the car of choice, a 75 series Landcruiser! They are shipping their car back to Europe, after 16 months on the road. It was great to talk to them, and we hope to stay in contact!

Now, all we are waiting for is to catch our flight to Chennai. We are going to beat the car there by 5 days, so hopefully we will get time to get to know the port and get everything sorted before the car arrives.

It has been almost 5 months that we have been driving around South East Asia, and I can’t say that we are leaving the region without a little regret. It is a really beautiful place, with so many wonders to see, but as usual, the most wonderful thing about our trip around has been the people we have met. I hope that it continues like this in the future.

Jonathan