Malaysian taxi cartels

For this trip we actually did a little bit of research, however, as usual, some things just don't go the way they've been planned.

We took an MRT to Changi airport on Thursday afternoon. This was my first departure from this airport, so I hadn't realized until then that Changi is actually a huge and a very modern facility. I was going to get a GST (sales tax) refund for my camera so we got there a good time before the flight. For my surprise, the refund process was, in fact, really easy and straightforward and I got my refund right away in Sing dollars.

The AirAsia flight to Kota Kinabalu wasn't among the cheapest ones, but our schedule was just not flexible enough to save a few dollars by getting the plane from Johor Bahru instead. Having arrived in KK we experienced the Malaysian taxi cartels for the first, but not for the last time. They only had a non-negociable fixed price trip to town centre, so we had no choice but to pay what they asked (I think the night fare was RM30 when bought at the counter).

Red Palm Hostel on Jalan Gaya was looking quite unimpressive on the outside, but was really nice indeed from the inside. The lobby, the bathrooms and our room were nicely decorated, clean and overall fine, and the staff was truly helpful. The three-person private room was RM90 total (6 € per person), really a good deal.

We woke up quite early on Friday to make a tour to the KK archipelago. You could have picked anything between 1 and 4 islands to visit, but because of our limited time, we chose only two: Manukan and Sapi. The boat trip was RM28 per person plus a RM5 ferry terminal tax, and a RM10 conservation fee to enter the islands (you only pay this fee once regardless of how many islands you visit).

Islands offered all the typical stuff: white beaches, snorkling, scuba, banana rides and other water sports. There were a few restaurants and I think accommodation would have been available as well. I burnt considerably badly on the beach but I didn't realize until the evening when my chest and back started turning bright red.

Once again when leaving to the airport, the taxi was not using the meter and tried to charge us RM30 despite that we had been told the price being fixed RM20. We did not consent to pay more than RM20, which was then suddenly OK.

Out on the tiles

Think of going to Gran Canaria for a weekend.

Well, this is not Gran Canaria nor Tenerife, but Pulau Bintan on the Indoneasian side about 60 km south-east of Singapore.

There were about 30 students from NTU and maybe 10 from NUS, all of them accommodated in the same small beach resort. Several kinds of water sport activities were available, but besides that, there was nothing else than the resort bar at which people spent their time. Combined with reasonably priced Bintang beer (IDR38k a pint) it of course ended up in extensive drinking.

 

 

The transportation and accommodation were cheap enough so that staying for only two nights was sensible. The boat from Tenah Merah ferry terminal to Bintan was S$60 for a return trip, and an hour taxi drive from the terminal to the resort in Bintan was S$43 per car. There are different kinds of rooms and bungalows in Nostalgia Yasin resort, but as we booked ours quite late, only the more pricey rooms (S$40 per room per night) in the larger building were available. It was like a typical basic hotel room with a sea-view from the balcony, so good value for the money anyway.

I didn't want to sit in the beach bar drinking beer from 10am onwards -- like some of the finns did -- so I took a walk to Ocean Restaurant and Resort about a kilometer down the main road. Luckily there was still one 125cc scooter available for rent (S$5 per hour, no licence required) so I hired that one and drove some 15 km to the nearest village. The village was built around the outlet of a river and mostly seemed to be a local fishing port. There were no tourists in this poor village and people didn't speak much English, but they were happy to pose for photos anyway.

 

 

Then I drove about 30-40 km in the other direction, but there was nothing but a couple of quite empty tourist resorts and an extremely small village consisting of only 20 houses or so. I didn't dare to try any dirt road leading to the jungle...

Some of us took a boat to the nearby islands to do some water sports and to lie down on those beautiful white beaches -- the beach by the resort was not that good actually. The food, on the other hand, was really delicious, the all-time favorite being tasty and affordable chicken satay. They had excellent pizza as well but that was on the expensive side. It seemed like they were not really prepared for this many tourists appearing just suddenly there as sometimes it really took a long time to get the food or even placing an order. The staff was very friendly all the time despite the rush.

One especially great thing in Nostalgia Yasin is that you can put everything on your room bill and pay it on check-out. So there's a competition of course, that who can break the 1 million rupiah boundary during a weekend.. That is about 20 pints and 10 chicken satays.

For more photos see my gallery.

The Petronas

The final decision of whether or not to go to Kuala Lumpur on Friday was made on Thursday. There was a group consisting of about 8 finns, 2 germans, 3 swedes, 2 canadians, a dutch and a slovak.

We left the campus early in the morning, at 8 o'clock, by taxi to the Woodlands checkpoint on the northern border (S$20 per car). Having cleared the customs, we took a local bus to the Johor Bahru bus interchange where several companies were offering express rides to KL. The price per person seemed to be quite fixed RM31 but I managed to negotiate it down to RM24 because we were a group of at least 15 people. This was of no use, however, because someone had already taken the offer of RM31 and were boarding onto a bus...

This trip was really convenient in an aircond bus with seats like the business class on a typical flight. It was a good time to sleep some more. The bus stopped for 20 mins at some kind of a break area where we could get some fast food to supplement the lean breakfast.

The ride took something like 5 hours, of which we spent at least an hour in a jam just a kilometer or two from the KL bus station. Most people were staying in the "cheapest shithole" they could find -- which was actually a pretty good description for that lousy hostel in Chinatown. I had booked a room in the huge Grand Seasons hotel near the north end of the monorail, so this was the time for me and the canadian guy Tim to part from the group to check in to our hotel. We got a typical two-bed hotelroom on the 20th floor -- nice change for the Hall 7 accommodation.

We were supposed to rendezvous with the others at Petronas towers at 7pm, but hardly made it there by 7:30 and couldn't find the others anywhere. Well, later they told us they were actually even more late... Anyway, we looked around a little bit, had a dinner and a couple of beers and returned to the hotel in order to wake up quite early next morning to get the free Sky bridge tickets.

One of the positive sides of staying in a hotel is the plentiful breakfast. It was a combination of continental and asian styles and really hit the spot. The monorail trip and a half a kilometer's walk to the Petronas towers took some 40 minutes, so we were there around 8:15am. Unfortunately this was way too late -- all the tickets were already gone despite that the counter would not open until 9am. It was really a kick in the teeth, but no-can-do.

We wanted to get "high" anyway, so the KL tower was the next obvious choice. It was actually almost double as high as the Petronas sky bridge, but cost like RM35 to enter. The view overlooking all around the city was very nice of course, and they had a short audio tour describing the different sights and monuments. The entrance fee also allowed us to visit a small but quite an interesting zoo with snakes, scorpions, monkeys and frogs to name a few. A pleasant surprise was that we met Jussi and Josh here reuniting the groups again. I usually avoid western food and tourist restaurants, but the club sandwich in the Rainforest café down in the tower was just awesome.

There were lots of bazaars in chinatown close to the hostel. They were just too tempting to pass, so almost everyone grabbed a shirt or two, some flipflops or shorts and maybe a belt or a "swiss army" pocket knife. After having late lunch at the bird park, the day started already to turn into a night, and the plan for the evening was to enjoy "a few" beers at the Petronas and then proceed to a club. The plan encountered some setbacks though, as the grocery stores stopped selling beer around 9 o'clock. Luckily this was easily fixed by the discovery of wine in one of the stores. Another kind of a setback was that people wore shorts and flipflops which are not good enough for any fine club (like the  Zouk), and, perhaps some of us were getting a little bit too drunk to enter any club, for that matter.

All the clubs downtown were pretty crowded and lots of people were also hanging out in the streets, but eventually we found a club that let us in although the group had already broken down a little bit, so there were only like 10 people left. The club closed after 3am and most of us were tired enough to get a cab and go to bed at this point. I'm not sure if the rest still continued partying somewhere.

We grabbed some breakfast in the morning but went back to bed and slept until the check-out at noon. People were heading back to S'pore at different times, but I thought there wasn't really enough time to see anything remarkable in KL anymore, so we just took a walk to the bus station and bought tickets for a direct ride to Singapore.

It was kind of a mistake. The bus was about 1.5 hours delayed, made two stops and was driving quite slowly. Then it took us to the depot next to the Levender MRT, which is almost an hour's trip from the Boon lay station. So finally I was back home around 10pm.

There is still a lot to see in KL so I think I'm going to have to make another trip quite soon.

For more pictures, pay a visit to my gallery.

Clubbing

The staff club was full of exchange students that night. An overwhelming majority was from the Nordic countries -- swedes mostly, but also a remarkable number of norwegians and finns (who numbered nine I think).

After having cheap malaysian beer at the staff club for a couple of hours, we took a bunch of cabs all heading to St. James Powerhouse club. It was S$20 to get in, but you got two free drinks for the price. The club was kind of average-sized, maybe somewhat bigger than "On the rocks" in Helsinki but smaller than Royal Onnela anyway. They were playing varying international dance hits mostly and the atmosphere was good.

Saturday was the last day of the Hall 7 Freshman camp, which came to a head in the evening in a form of a party -- which the finns were also (kind of) invited to. This party was not about getting drunk, but they had some joke-ish games and music performances there, and a buffet-style dinner of course.

Sunday, then, was the national day of Singapore. And it's pretty big here. A huge crowd of people was gathering around the Marina area, some of them to see the parade and the fireworks, some (the finns especially) to drink beer in the park and have fun. After the moment of the declaration of independence, which is exactly at 8:22pm, our executive party chief Desmond gathered up the exchange students to take them to a nearby club.

People started to be somewhat drunk already, so only a few actually got to the club altogether. It was a two-floor club, S$28 to get in (including two free drinks), the first floor playing all kinds of dance, hip-hop, pop etc. and the upper floor being dedicated to house/trance music. I found the DJ actually being really good -- until like 3pm, when the volume was just getting unbearably high and starting to hurt ears. :)

Hanging out

The first night was warm at the least, but I was so tired that it wasn't, in fact, any problem to get sleep. I woke up at 9am to the noise of the nearby expressway as well as to the direct sunlight on my eyes -- have to remember the curtains next time.

After breakfast in the canteen I headed to the café next to the international house with my laptop to do some blogging. The air-con in the place was rubbish and I couldn't see the screen clearly outdoors, so I decided to try the next place. On the way there, however, I came across the Danish girl I met yesterday, accompanied by an English girl. We spent some time in the literally cool Café by the Quad, after which we got on the bus to Jurong point again as the dane hadn't yet done the pillow shopping.

I purchased a 16" fan with a floor stand for S$19.90 as the one on the ceiling is not exactly very efficient. Now waiting for the first party which is about to begin shortly at the staff club.

Highway to Hall 7

The flight was ok. It was hellishly long of course, about 26 hours including the waiting time between connecting flights, but there were no problems really. It appeared that finns are permitted to stay in HK for three months without a visa, so I had no trouble getting to the country -- in order to claim my baggage and check it back in to the next flight.




The last piece of the trip, the budget Jetstar flight, was half an hour delayed, but more frustrating than that was that the check-in desk only opened just before the estimed boarding time (which was later delayed, of course), so I couldn't get rid of my huge suitcase during those 6 hours I had to stay at the HK airport.

The Jetstar flight had very inexperienced cabin crew, but it didn't really matter as nothing was served for free anyway, just like on Ryanair flights. Next to me was sitting a Singaporean who had graduated from NTU just some time ago. She told me that the last MRT train had gone before midnight, so I was going to have to take a cab to the hostel.

The people at the Footprints backpacker hostel were really friendly indeed. I had developed a nice hunger during the last few hours, so I really had to get something to eat. The problem was - almost nothing was open at 2am. A guy at the hostel directed me to a nearby Thai restaurant that was still serving food and even pretty cheap pints of Tiger after midnight. There was a western-looking woman from Masqat, Oman also having a beer, and she told me, she was almost freezing because it was so cold, only like 30 degrees.

The hostel night indeed was cold because the air-con was too strong for that little room and you couldn't adjust it more than in "on-off" manner.

In the morning, that is like 11am, I had breakfast in an Indian-style café and proceeded to check-out from the hostel. I then took a short walk to the MRT station to experience the best subway I have seen so far. It is just fast, clean, air-conditioned, relatively inexpensive and goes often.

At the Boon lay station I met a swede who was looking a little bit lost. That was not really a miracle since the directions provided by NTU were simply non-existent. Nevertheless, we managed to find the correct bus and after asking for a local NTU student for some help we alighted from the vehicle in the (almost) right place. Then, once again after begging for help from the extremely friendly locals, the international student centre finally stood before us.

Completely exhausted from dragging the suitcases across the campus, I just filled in the forms and paid the fees to receive the official student pass. The swede left to lunch with his country-mates, and I headed to Hall 7 for accommodation. The rooms in hall 7 are accessed from the corridors outside (like luhti-houses) and the buildings resembled me of a tourist resort. All-in-all, it's a beautiful place -- from the outside.




The room itself, quite frankly, is just bad. It is indeed cheap in absolute terms, but regarding the price per square meter, I wouldn't call it a bargain anymore. Anyway, I could've gladly paid some more to get a better one. Since there's no air-con in the room, I will be really excited to see how I'm gonna do the first night. I'm seriously now considering renting a room from the private market.

My roommate turned out to be a finn from TKK as well. After meeting each other in the afternoon we blitzed the Jurong Point mall (next to Boon lay MRT station) to buy some necessities, like pillows, which had not been provided by NTU. It was in fact a pretty large mall, comparable to the size of a couple of Sellos or Jumbos (Finnish malls). Virtually anything can be bought there.

As for the dinner, not many canteenas were open anymore at 8pm. This time the guidance to a still open place was given by Chinese students.

Before take-off

The launch will be in T-minus 15 hours.

Now packing the last bits of my stuff. I was really trying to stick to the most essential stuff only, but the suitcase grew up to 17 kilograms... I'll have to scrap something.

There's a couple of things that I'm a little concerned about, but nothing devastating really.

First of all I just hope I have all the documents with me and have successfully filled in all the web-forms. I don't know how am I supposed to get to Singapore without a visa in my hand, but at least I have applied for it and paid the fees, so maybe it's OK.

Before entering Singapore, however, I may have some trouble at Hong kong due to the same reason. I don't have a visa to HK either because I'm just switching to a connecting flight. But it's a different airline and the baggage will not be transferred automatically, so I will have to enter the baggage claim area which might be outside the international zone. Well, at least I have plenty of time to fight it through at the HK airport.

The biggest surprise will be the accommodation at the NTU campus area. I really have no idea at all how brilliant or how horrible is the dormitory. But I do have a pretty strong gut feeling that there won't be air-conditioning in the rooms. And that might a kind of an.. insuperable obstacle. If this is the case, I'll probably have to look for off-campus accommodation, and that is surely significantly more expensive. Or I'll just buy a portable AC.

Besides of those issues, everything else seems to be going fine. I even had time to go the gym this evening.

I exported the NTU area map from Street directory and saved it as a one large PNG file. Then I put the image on my iPhone (with scp, you can't do it through iTunes), so I can browse the map off-line with any PNG viewer such as iFile. It works great.


BTW, it won't work if you convert it to a jpeg and then use iTunes to upload in on the phone. It would be rendered into horribly bad quality.