p o r t h o: Asia Holiday 2013, August 21 (Metalaysia)

Sadly, I had to give in and get a taxi out to the airport, since the airport bus doesn't start until 9am (they do realise that flights leave before that right?) and I had to be there by about 8am. I got the hotel to sort out a taxi, and as he's pulling out of the driveway he's trying to turn right into two lanes of oncoming traffic. I couldn't work out what was happening because there is a large median strip separating the two directions of traffic, but sure enough he got into the outside lane and starts driving down the street the wrong way, with cars coming the other way. Even weirder, the outside lane he was driving in was mostly empty, and whenever we approached an oncoming car in the same lane they'd slow down, apologise and try to squeeze into a single lane to get out of the way. It's as if there is some rule at peak time they change the direction of traffic.

After we got through the city traffic I started to see signs not for the old airport but for the new. Despite saying the name of the airport many times due to issues in the past, I had a bad feeling we were still going to the wrong airport. So I asked him which airport he's going to, without mentioning either name, to make sure I didn't confuse the question, and thankfully he said the correct one. There must be some common road to get you on your way to both airports, and the disaster was averted.

The plane trip went without a problem, one good thing about flying out of the old abandoned airport is there is no congestion and no waiting in line! Landing in KL wasn't as much fun, there was a huge queue in the immigration line for foreign passports that took about 45 minutes to get through. How come every time I fly to another country the line for foreign passports is huge, and every time I return to Australia the line for local passports is huge. I know for the latter it's probably because I'm flying home on an Australian airline a lot of the time, but flying Air Asia from Thailand to Malaysia I would have hoped at least some of the passengers were locals, but apparently not. When I finally reached the front I wanted to say "Customs? Isn't this the line for Metallica?". At the currency exchange place and finally remembered to change all my old currency, by this stage it was random amounts of:

Canadian
English
Thai
US

It took forever as they had to process each amount separately, I don't think they people in line behind me were too happy, but I didn't care by this stage.

Another problem with Air Asia in KL is they land in the LCCT (low cost carrier terminal - what an impressive sounding name) instead of the main KLIA terminal (which has the express train to KL city centre of course). Even though the two are "nearby", the time it takes to get a transfer bus over to the main terminal (20 minutes) plus the time for the train (30 minutes) ends up being the same as just taking a city bus (50-60 minutes) for a third of the price!

I got out at the bus terminal at KL Sentral and surprise, crap directions to the monorail, just like Bangkok all over again. There was initially a few signs every 50 metres, then we reach a main street and there's suddenly no signs anymore. Now where the hell am I supposed to go? I wasn't sure if I'd missed a sign or not, and I really hate it when the directions are so poor you have to rely on guesswork and instinct in place of information. I turned down the street to what looked like an walkway under construction, which I guessed was eventually going to be the way to transfer from the bus and train terminal to the monorail, and by luck I was correct. The monorail fare was RM 2.10 so I started digging around for coins, only the Malaysian notes are so lightweight, and the monorail station was so windy, all of the money blew out of my wallet and scattered on the floor. I managed to grab most of it, I had missed one RM 50 (about $15) but some guy picked it up and gave it back, so that was good.

MONORAIL.

My hotel was nicely located in Bukit Bintang just one street away from the monorail station, I couldn't even remember much about the hotels I picked since it was so long ago, it seems my priorities may have been:

Easy access from public transport
Free breakfast (only in HK and BK sadly)
Coin laundry

I dropped off my luggage and then had to hurry back out to walk down to Stadium Merdeka to pick up my ticket for Metallica playing in the evening. There was a whole bunch of construction going on around Bukit Bintang walk which made it a bit difficult to get around, some of the footpaths were closed off, but I made it there in the end. It wasn't 5pm yet, and Metallica weren't due to start until 9pm, but there was already people starting to line up at the various gates, and many more doing the music equivalent of tailgating, or maybe it's still called tailgating... I got my ticket and a souvenir shirt for RM 90, that's a bargain compared to Australian prices.

Metal merchandise.

On the way back to the hotel I found a 7-Eleven and slurpees were back! I got the fun sounding "Tutti Frutti" and a Mountain Dew "Pitch Black with a PUNCH of Grape Citrus flavour", why don't they sell that stuff here? I had a look at some of the fast food restaurants for some quick options before getting ready for the concert, but all of the favourites like Burger King, Carls Jr, McDonalds and KFC had no vegetarian options. With the higher muslim population in Malaysia I figured I might have a bit more luck, but apparently not. Instead I visited the Pavilion shopping centre and found a Nando's! Similar to Bangkok, they have some pretty decent food prices (clothes yet to be determined) in KL, the price of a vegetable burger and chips (not many of them) was only about RM 15. I also found more Bread Talk (not the Australian chain Bread Top if I have not qualified this yet, but it seems like this is what they have copied from) and Boost Juice seems to be expanding a lot into KL in particular.

Slurpees!

Pavilion Mall.

The Big Ticket.

Back to the hotel to drop off all of my non-essentials for the evening to go back to Metallica. There was a lot of signs saying that no digital cameras were allowed inside (despite the ever increasing quality of mobile phone cameras), but I figured I would risk it and see what happens - if I got turned around there was a good chance I'd miss the start if I had to do yet ANOTHER trip to the hotel and back again. I stashed my camera in a jacket pocket before the security checkpoint and hoped the guy would miss it, I think he glanced over it as he was checking my pockets, but then just waved me through, success!

I just bought tickets in the seated section, as the standing area was super expensive, like $150 and above. All of the good seats were already taken by 8pm, so I could either take a seat further away or stand along the rail at the back of the seated section. I opted for the railing because you can also sit and lean on it, and once the music starts everyone just stands up anyway. I think I made the right choice as I had a good view of the band on stage when they started early around 8:45pm. Since this was the first time they had played in KL in their 31 years of touring they stuck to the classics just about: