Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Hmm, it wasn’t really Bali that I disliked but our hotel room. Our flight got in at 10:30pm, we tucked ourselves into our silk liners (you know what that means) at 12:00am, and we left for the airport at 10:30am. So, we didn’t really see Bali at all; instead we saw the inside of a run-down “beach cottage” hotel complex and got to sweat it out in a room with a half-assed airconditioner.
The room had seen better days. The sheets looked dirty (suspicious crinkly white patches), the bathroom was crumbly around the edges, and the whole place smelled of moth balls. (When I complained to Casey about the horrible, headache-inducing smell he pointed out that they probably used them to keep away the bugs. “Probably had too many tourists wake them up in the middle of the night screaming about the cockroach in their room.” So I shut my trap pronto.) The first room we were in had a hole in the ceiling (yikes!) so I was happy when they had to move us because the a-c didn’t work. The next room was better; it seemed cleaner and didn’t have any holes in plain view (but of course still had the moth balls and dirty sheets). We were such sticklers about the a-c since it was 88 degrees outside at 11pm! The windows couldn’t be opened (they had them bolted shut for some reason) so therefore it was either have a working air conditioner or sleep outside. The “working” one still wasn’t very effective and made the inside just bearable. (The one we have now gets the room icy-cold in about ten minutes. That’s the way a-c should be!)
We both didn’t sleep very well. The hotel was under the airport’s flight path and the roaring of the engines woke Casey a few times. A rooster crowing at 4am (and every 20 minutes thereafter) seemed like a flasback to the Cook Islands. One of the little emaciated dogs that roam the streets started barking sometime after I had gotten up and kept waking Casey from his attempt to sleep in a little bit. That was yesterday morning; this morning I slept in until 9:30 am.
We had a fun time last night eating hawker food and enjoying our nice little hotel room. As Casey pointed out, we have a great view of the city and at night we can see tons of sparkling lights. After we ate, we went to the 7-Eleven (which they also have in Australia) and stocked up on beer and water and peanut M&Ms (our staples). When we got back to our room we cranked up the a-c, turned on Discovery Channel (yes, we are hopelessly Western but it is nice to watch TV in a language that you can understand) and planned our next travel move.