Day 268 – The shortest flight and other complaints

We left the hotel in Kota Kinabalu to go to the airport at 1PM. We arrived to our hotel in Brunei at 6PM. Out of these five hours the flight was… 20 minutes! I'm not exaggerating; it was really the shortest flight I have ever been on. It was actually pretty funny – everything was just like in a real flight, but in very fast motion, the only thing missing to complete our Charlie Chaplin remake was this soundtrack: a young good-looking steward seated us down, offered us a glass of water and conducted a safety demonstration, immediately followed by collecting empty glasses and a request to stow away our tables and put up our chairs.

I am not complaining about the shortness of this flight. What I'm complaining about is the fact that we are in the 21^st century already, and teleportation hasn't been invented yet! Every time I get ready for the airport – factoring in the 5,000 hours it takes to stand in traffic on the way there, going through security and check-in pushing all your stupid heavy suitcases with your knee desperately trying (and mostly failing) to keep this luggage pyramid stay put in front of you instead of scattered all over the floor knocking over other people's bags while inflicting minor injuries onto yourself and unlucky innocent by-standers – I cannot help but imagine… You are about to go on a diving trip from New York to Cozumel. All you have to do is point at your packed bags and whatever items you plan to take with you on the trip (it may be your comfortable couch or your favorite painting, now you can afford to travel in style) with a special device – let's call it "magic travel stick", - sit back on the said comfortable couch and do some programming of this device with precise destination coordinates and perhaps some other relevant info. And voila – a second later you are in Cozumel… Wouldn't that be nice? I haven't figured how to go through passport control yet though… And there's also the issue of possible "overpopulating" some popular destinations… But I'm sure all the issues can be resolved by putting some effective controls in place (in fact, I wouldn't mind being part of the workflow design project myself)... In all the sci-fi books I read as a child this method of transportation was widely available by year 2010. Liars!

Since I got into the complaining mode, let me present two other major issues I have with Malaysia.

"Chargeable" toilets

There are two kinds of toilets in Malaysia: spacious, spotless, with a smell of fresh flowers, and… free AND tiny, dirty, with slippery water-flooded floors, and paid (or employing the local term, "chargeable")! This oddity exists widely across the country. You have to pay 20-50 cents for the pleasure of entering this disgusting haven and another 50-80 cents to become a lucky owner of some toilet paper. What the hell? In one of the paid toilets, I almost exploded with shocked rage when the staff had the nerve to ask me if I "enjoyed the bathroom experience". We couldn't find any plausible reason to explain this phenomenon, but we started to incorporate those useful epithets into any bathroom description: "Wait till another rest-stop if you can – the toilet here looks just like a chargeable one"; "They should be charging us for this one – the floor is so slippery I almost fell".

The Malaysian English

In this country Malay, Indians, and Chinese co-exist more or less happily, mingling with each other at work and play on a daily basis. They all know English because this is the language they use to communicate with each other. And oh my, what English it is! I thank my lucky stars every day here for introducing me to the www.engrish.com website back in the day – that's the only reason I understand anything here. Somewhat. I rarely get understood myself outside the hotels, UNLESS I strengthen my accent to its very fullest Russian and deform the grammar to its very simplest, enunciating slowly and carefully (at the same time heavily utilizing hands and body language): "Me – pRawn noodles. No spicy. She – dRink caRd. No, not green card, dRink caRd. Yes. Your coffee – too strong. My cup – half water, half coffee. No, no, no, not half milk. Wa-te-r. Yes. No, not tea. Half coffee, half water. Eh, whatever. Nothing, nothing, I want no-thing more. Thank you. Terima-kasih."

And this happens not only at the cheapest food stands. Sometimes our guides or hotel managers are equally unable to construct a coherent English sentence. Language is definitely not the main tool of healthy communication here. What is it, I wonder?

Enough with the complaints!

Today was so cool! In the morning, before our short flight to Brunei, we saw orangutan feeding. Again, nobody was looking forward to it, because it was so damn hot and humid and in order to participate you have to climb up the rainforest path for a while. And of course, it turned out to be an amazing experience.

The Shangri-La Rasa Ria hotel, where we stayed our last night on Borneo, has its own orangutan nursery: for the past several years they have been making an effort to find abandoned baby orangutans, take them in and feed and protect them in the natural environment of the rainforest until they turn 7; this is the age when orangutans can start taking care of themselves, so they are released into the wild. The nursery already has over 15 "graduates" and currently has 4 little residents. In the nursery, orangutans can learn whatever skills they are supposed to be learning, but in the safety of professional – instead of parental – supervision. The animals are on a strict meal schedule: breakfast is served at 10AM, lunch – at 2PM, there's no dinner.

After about ten minutes of our sweating our butts off in the giant steam-room of the morning rainforest, two little orangutans finally heard the pleas of their "mentors" and showed up. One was apparently starving and without any further ado went straight to the feeding hand of one of the guys (encouraging him to eat more in MalayJ). Interestingly, the other one didn't seem hungry at all (maybe he has some snack stashed away and thus survives the absence of scheduled dinner, I don't know). She decided to give us a full-fledged orangutan talent performance – jumping up and down the trees, swinging back and forth on tree branches, occasionally breaking them and dropping them on our heads, striking many picture-worthy poses and careful to pause in them for a second as if giving us a chance to photograph her. She will make a great catwalk model when she grows up. The show lasted for about 40 minutes, after which she finally got hungry and joined her friend at the breakfast table.