After the sulphur mine we had planned to do a clinic in a jungle in Borneo. This meant taking a flight from Surabaya, East Java to KL, then a flight the next day to Kuching in Malaysian Borneo. A final word about Indonesia, they have this thing called an 'airport tax'....! So you basically have to pay to leave the country!! 15 dollars each. Crazy. You still have to buy a visa upon entering too. Anyway, long story short, we were pretty full of cold by the time we arrived in Kuching, our jungle clinic got cancelled (we don't know why) but we REALLY needed to rest anyway so it kinda worked out. On the positive side we met some lovely people in Kuching. John and Cyn are a married couple who we stayed with for a couple of nights, they totally opened their home and hearts to us. We spoke about life, spirituality, family and the like. Then you had Dave Chin, a local geezer who went out of his way to help us out for the short time we spent together.
When it was time to leave we wanted to avoid taking a taxi. See when we arrived in Kuching the airport staff told us no buses leave from the airport so our only option was to taxi at a fixed rate of 26 ringgit, way above the normal rates. This left us a little miffed and we were determined to get public transport to the airport on our way out. So we asked Dave, he explained that there is a bus terminal 15 min walk away from the airport. 'It's not ideal but if you insist you can get a bus to there and walk'. Cool, problem solved. Get a bus for 3 ringgit each and stroll to the airport. So we got to the bus terminal, as soon as we got off the bus it started raining.... heavily!! Enquiring about the way to the airport people were like, 'what?! You want to walk?' One lad told us it will take an hour..! Undeterred we trooped on with our 20kg bags and got majorly soaked. To make matters worse there was no foot path between the bus terminal and the airport so we were walking on wet grass, almost swampy at times! We were a picture coming into the airport, defiling their freshly mopped floor with every step. Our boarding passes were so wet and stuck together that Mandeep had to prize them apart with surgical precision, hanging them out to dry before we could use them. Yes, Kuching soaked us good n proper, made our journey to the airport very difficult, made the contents of our bags damp and stale, but it didn't defeat us. We flew out slow-nodding with the sweet satisfaction of proving the airport staff wrong when they told us the taxi is the only way. In your face Kuchng!
No comments:
Post a Comment