Day 1 - Coolangatta to Kuala Lumpur

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Early morning start to the day……we left Warwick at 2.00am to make sure we arrived at Coolangatta Airport in plenty of time after dropping off our car to the storage facility for its 3 months holiday on the Gold Coast. It worked out cheaper to leave the car in storage including the cost of fuel to get there and back then it did to pay for a motel room for 2 nights and bus and train tickets to and from Warwick, even before the other half haggled down the price. He must have been getting back into practice for Asia. We didn’t end up arriving at the airport too early after all. Cunningham’s Gap was closed for an hour because someone was dragging a huge-arse Siemens transformer over the range. We didn’t even think to check the road closures before we left. It was all good in the end and we still arrived with plenty of time to spare. The flight to Kuala Lumpur was uneventful so won’t bore anyone with the details.

We organised a prepaid taxi from LCCT to the Hotel Lok Ann, our accommodation dead set in the centre of Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur. It comes complete with the infamous wet bathroom, but was clean and in a great location. LCCT is about 60 kilometres from the centre of KL, with 4 bags and 2 backpacks there was no way we were going to attempt public transport. Half way to KL from LCCT and the skies opened up and boy did it rain. When we arrived in China Town it was still bucketing down and the streets had water running everywhere. There was no way our very unintrepid taxi driver was getting out of his cab to help with the bags. Don’t blame him actually. The hotel is directly across the street from the entrance to the Petaling night markets. The markets here reminded us of the ones in Hong Kong and were much tamer than those we had seen in Bangkok. They sold the usual t-shirts, watches, knock off bags and shoes, and of course copied DVDs. Dinner was curry at a hawker and it was not a bad mutton curry at that. It was an early night as we were both still running on Australian time.

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