you get what you pay for…

Sorry for the delay.. we’ve been away from the internet and our days have been pretty packed. This is the first chance we’ve had to stop and take a breath… so before Sarina has a heart attack, here’s out first post…

We flew direct from Adelaide to KL where we had a 4 hour stop over before we hopped a domestic flight to Tawau. I don’t think I need to talk much about that first flight… it was a cruisy 7 hours with a nice inflight entertainment system and a couple of meals. Then we arrived in KL and experienced first hand the joys of the LCCT. If you’ve never heard of it then you’ve probably never flown Air Asia, but before I go into that, allow me to set the mood.

See this: ——————

That’s a line…. watch your screen for a minute…. ok see how it’s not moving? Go get a coffee…. Are you back now? See how that line still hasn’t moved? See how there’s a line in front of you that’s not moving? Am I being too obtuse?

We got off the plane in KL and strolled down to passport control where we hit a slow moving wall of people. There were maybe 3 counters and the line wasn’t moving at all. We spent about an hour in that line… thank god for our Kindles. Then we spent 40 minutes waiting for our luggage, only to find out that while we were all in passport control, they cleared the carousel for the next arriving flight and we had to go to the lost luggage area. Then we went to the domestic check in area and found out that Air Asia leaves from a different terminal, which was in another building… 25 minutes away…. via a taxi…. with a hood that kept flying up while our driver did twice the speed limit.

And that’s how we arrived at the LCCT… the Low Cost Carrier Terminal.

I’m trying to come up with an acronym that spells shithole… but all I have is Significantly Homely International Terminal Housing Overwhelming Lines (that are) Endless.

Not very good I know.. and “homely” implies that it has some kind of charm or character, which it definitely doesn’t.

Anyway it was all ok because we’d checked in electronically online and had already printed our boarding passes, so all we needed to do was go through the security checkpoint, check our bags, grab some lunch and head for the departure gate.

I mean that took another two hours because as each bag came through the xray machine an airline employe manually stuck a ” security checked” sticker on each bag. Then we joined a fast moving cue to check the bags and got to the front only to discover that this particular counter, and this counter only was serving a specific flight (not ours). So we got stuck behind another unmoving line that was full of people with sacks of chickens and boxes full of whatever, every single one of them over the 15KG weight limit imposed by a budget airline and every single one of them arguing that they probably shouldn’t have to pay the excess.

Ok this is taking too long and you don’t want to hear about boring airport stories do you?…. suffice to say, I spent another 30 mins in a line at McDonalds before giving up, then I had to go through security twice because they had a super sensitive x-ray machine at the SHITHOLE… but we finally made it to our flight, stressed, tired, hungry, but with 5 minutes to spare before boarding time, which is always a risk with a budget airline.

But it was ok because our flight was a half hour late, which is always a risk with a budget airline.

Join us next time for some actual interesting stuff… we just needed to throw something up so mum knew we weren’t dead.