Langkawi 08

DAY 3.

Rise and shine lads, it's the last day. Although the gang were up gambling till late everybody was up and ready at 6.30am to depart. After all, we needed to catch the 8.15 ferry to make it in time for the 10.15 bus back to KL. A few people had left early to make it for the 7am ferry as they needed to go to Kangar to collect the mobile phone left behind in the bus when we first came to Kuala Perlis. This was really our lifeline as we later realised. Our bags were packed and biscuits eaten, we decided to go down and get moving. Once we were downstairs, one car could not start. My suspicion is that the car has some problems with it's starter and it drinks oil like mad, it's RPM at rest was 3000! Crazy car. That really set us back and we had to wait for the rental guy to come and collect the car and stuff. With that we missed the window of opportunity to get onto the 7am ferry. However, we still didn't panic because we were confident of getting on the 8.15am ferry.

We got the jetty and quickly ran in because it was already 8am. Confidently we presented our tickets to the guard and to our dismay we realised that we hadn't "confirmed" our tickets! The guy who sold us the tickets sure didn't say anything about confirmation! We were screwed. The next ferry at 9am had only 9 places left as well. Keep in mind our bus was at 10.15am. After our attempt to bribe the guard into letting us in failed, we were negotiating with the ferry company to let the 14 of us into the 9am ferry. 5 people could stand, we wouldn't mind. However, while we were negotiating with them, the damned ferry company sold the other 9 tickets! What a pain in the ass! Now we were really screwed as we were sure we would miss our bus and would have to not only buy another ticket, we'd need to wait till nightfall for the next bus and only make it to KL on tuesday morning! What a blowout.

This is where the missing phone threw us a lifeline. The first group of 4 who had left on the 7am ferry were already there waiting for us (having obtained the phone). Somehow against the odds, they managed to stop the bus that came in from Kangar and made them wait for a full hour as we took the 10am ferry and made it to the jetty at 11am. Really amazing as normally express buses will never wait for even 10 minutes! Somehow they did it and we made it onto the bus. However as with everything else in Malaysia, we bribed the driver to make it worth his wait. How unsuprising. Well at least it was better than paying another RM43 for another bus ticket and waiting till nightfall for the next bus and even then we're not sure if we'll all have a spot on the bus!

At long last after many many stops to pee, eat, pee again, pour oil and whatever else we saw the skyline of Kuala Lumpur loom in the horizon. And the adventure had ended. Another memorable holiday for all of us...