Departure Day

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I had an early start today - not that this really mattered because having sold my bed yesterday I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on top of some sheets. With a few final tasks to attend to before starting to make my way across London towards Heathrow I was glad that my flight scheduled departure time wasn't until 10pm, and figured I'd sleep well on the plane.


I took a few final things from my flat, including the aforementioned sleeping bag and my dressing gown, to the charity shop on Church Road, and sent my iphone home to my parents by Special Delivery (I decided a while back that taking the handset on tour with me wasn't a great idea, and transferred the sim card to an older Sony Ericsson phone which, besides, has better resolution on its camera). Then it was time to take the final meter readings and a few photos and say goodbye to the flat I rented for the past 18 months, taking the keys down to the letting agents in South Norwood.


By 1pm I was ready to head for West London. I met up with two friends: first Clare (and her rescue greyhound companion, Gyp) from the Trades Union club in Acton then Marc in Ealing, who visited some of the places I'm planning to go (it is he who convinced me to include Cambodia in my itinerary) and wrote about it at Overland Cruiser. After a cappuccino and final pre-departure itinerary discussion it was time to catch the tube to Heathrow.

Ready to Fly

The passage through check-in and security was straightforward. I planned my packing with the intention of taking all of my luggage on the plane, in my 50+15 litre backpack. This backpack has a detachable 'day pack' which is very useful - here I put my laptop and guidebook in there and described it as the 'laptop bag'. This meant I could keep the main bag's weight down to the 5kg specified on the airline website. At the desk they didn't ask me to put the bags on the scales, just waved it through. As always there were queues at security, but there were plenty of staffed desks so they moved fairly fast. One other factor that affected my packing was the cabin luggage liquids ban, which meant I couldn't bring with me some things I'll need such as sun lotion, and mosquito repellent.

The plane was fuller than the last time - 3 years ago - I travelled to KL. Many of the passengers were Chinese so the proximity of the Chinese New Year holiday (February 3 this year) probably made a difference. The woman in the seat next to me was travelling to KL for that reason. We discussed life in London for a while before take-off and I found that she lived in Acton and worked at Hammersmith Hospital (which is where I did my PhD). Overall the flight went fine: though I didn't sleep as much as I'd hoped I wasn't uncomfortable and passed quite a lot of the time playing the games in the seat-back entertainment system and, when I could, working on my laptop. The plane passed through some noticeable turbulence twice, corresponding to the times of the two in-flight meals once over Germany and once over the bay of Bengal - not great for the appetite!

Despite the slightly late departure the plane arrived in KL quite a bit ahead of schedule. The passage through the KLIA airport was again straightforward, although it did involve getting a shuttle bus from the landing terminal to the arrivals hall at least I didn't have to wait around conveyor belts for any cabin luggage. After checking the signs to make sure I didn't have to declare the foreign currency I was carrying it was through the green channel and straight to the KLIA Ekspres station for the train to the city centre.

On arrival at KL Sentral I was determined not to get a taxi and to save money by getting the monorail for a few stops to the nearest station to my B&B, however finding the monorail station - which the network maps make it look like is right next to the train station - turned out to be a bit of a puzzle: see my next post...

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