Blog 2: 15th April 2014. Flight day! And pre-holiday holiday

T minus zero days... and a trip to Windsor

Our flight was due to leave at 2200hrs, and we were in London. What better then, than to have a day trip somewhere! Emma and I with much deliberation (i.e. "Shall we go somewhere, even though our very expensive flight leaves today?" "Yeah alright!") decided to hop on a bus from Hatton Cross to nearby Feltham station, to take a train, and disappear off to nearby Windsor for the day, with no plan for what to do when we got there other than the knowledge that it had a bloody big castle and was near some famous school. So we set off, and stoically fought off the nippy April wind, albeit under a brilliantly blue spring sky, dressed in aeroplane-friendly clothes (not having brought coats, owing to the plan of going to Malaysia!). For want of imagery, I was dressed in a stylish blue fleece accompanied by stylish blue trousers, which could cleverly be converted to shorts by means of a pair of cunningly included zips!

Our train arrived at the high-walled and immaculate "Windsor and Eton Riverside" station. The station itself boasted delicately placed ornate lampposts decorating its sweeping twin platforms, bordered on one side by a high (yet graffiti-free) sandstone wall, and the other by a low iron railing, leading north to the station car-park and eventually River Thames and town of Eton. The station building comprised of a neat prism of a glass roof, supported by Hammerite red iron beams, and little else apart from a short concourse, automatic ticket barriers and a couple of information stands. 

Windsor Riverside and Eton Station platform

Turning left out of the main station exit we were immediately impressed by the look and feel of Windsor town's cleanliness, neatness, and traditional architecture, overlooked by the incredible and imposing castle atop the hill. Across the road to the south of the station on the Datchet Road was the tudor styled Royal Oak pub, to its left the 1930s style sandstone buildings of St George's School. We crossed the road via a zebra crossing, and made a right turn toward signs saying Town Centre, marvelling at the castle perched above us to the left. We turned left at the George V memorial, a great horizontal limestone monument, complete with bird baths and fountains. Thames Street, which was lined with Union Flags, took us past a stone back-gate to Windsor castle before it climbed to the right, orthogonal to the slope of the castle's hill. Thames Street was a great example of a traditional English high street, albeit lined on the left by the slopes of Windsor Castle. To the right it sported 4-storey pre-war buildings, with traditional wooden and glass shop fronts containing local businesses, cafes, fudge shop and even a Japanese restaurant. The old-fashioned Theatre Royal, still immaculate, was in the middle of this row of shops, about half-way up the hill before it turned to the left in front of the castle itself, and had just finished showing Jesus Christ superstar a couple of days beforehand. Its cream coloured ground-floor paintwork didn't detract from its inviting overhanging entranceway, adorned with dozens of lightbulbs so typical of show business. We made it just past the theatre, but on the opposite side of the road, before noticing a bus stop, which had on it an advert for the amphibious Windsor Duck!

And the spending started there...

Duck!

The letters YOLO came to mind, and were quickly quashed for the sake of all things street-cred. But they had an impact, and I was just about to look up the prices and timetable of the duck tours when astute Emma pointed out that they were printed just below the advert, and that the next tour was not fully booked and would arrive shortly! In the stiff April breeze we waited in typical British style, a couple of metres up the road from the relative warmth of the bus shelter. There were a couple of people in it, you see, and one can't be too careful these days! Especially with pensioners like that. A crowd of tourists joined us (the pot here definitely calling the kettle all sorts of names, as I had a camera fixed to my hand), and we were sort of swallowed up among them for a while before the bright yellow duck with its massive tyres came trundling up the hill. She was a beast of a machine, a great big pointy bow to the front giving way to the cockpit above, sporting three strong panoramic windows and a roof. Its roofed passenger cabin seated at least 24 people, and it had retractable plastic sides that could be pulled down in the unlikely even of rain. It had an afterdeck just rearward of its second set of wheels, the deck containing the retractable metal staircase allowing embarking/disembarking of passengers. Not waiting to see why the dozen or so camera-bearers were waiting around, we did the very un-British thing of being assertive, and determining from the crewmember at the rear of the machine, after the previous passenger load disembarked, that there was space and it would only cost us ₤18 each to board, we took our seats and awaited departure.

The duck tour, albeit extremely chilly, was good fun! It took us around the west and south aspects of the castle, including its main gates, and down toward the aptly titled Long Walk. Before it left the castle behind, we noted the very long queue of people waiting to actually get access to the castle itself, stretching from the entry hut most of the way down the first stretch of St Albans Street, a good hundred yards or so. We waved at them, and they waved at us, a couple taking photos of us taking photos of them (for evidence, I assume).

http://www.windsorducktours.co.uk/

The duck, which we were reassured was purpose built, and not a renovated ex-military machine (reading between the lines - it wasn't going to blow up like the unfortunate sinkings in Liverpool and London), seemed to have only three methods of moving when on land: Bone-jarring halt, back-breaking acceleration into low-range gear, and shriekingly-loud but not shriekingly-fast high-range gear. We were taken around popular tourist hotspots with commentary by a local Windsor boy, who remembers fondly stealing apples from Her Majesty's back garden. The route took us to the south of the castle, out into the open countryside, following parallel to and then cutting across the miles long "The Long Walk", a directly straight path leading from the castle itself to a huge statue of a horse and rider, the King George III statue, visible from miles around, situated in Windsor Great Park, a park apparently containing the large(st?) man-made series of lakes and ponds!

Duck!

The Long Walk - look back towards Windsor Castle

The machine then cut back through Windsor town, our commentator described how the recent flooding had devastated the low-lying floodplains of the surrounding countryside of the Thames. We had a good narrative of the stories of the many bridges, and the most recent one to be built that had also been destroyed owing to disagreements between the landowners on either side of it leading to its very poor construction, before WWII! We were then taken to the industrial and less attractive areas of Windsor (Prince Charles described one 1960s concrete block of flats as the ugliest building he'd ever seen!). The reason for this being access to the River Thames upstream of the town itself, via a sports centre complex! We were given a safety briefing, told not to do silly things like run around or jump overboard, and shuffled around a bit in the half-full passenger compartment to adjust the ballast of the soon-to-be boat.

Entering the River Thames oh-so-cautiously, the driver (now captain) engaged the propeller and we bobbed off downstream at a leisurely pace toward Windsor. On the way he pointed out the old railway bridge to the other Windsor station (there had been a race during the early days of railways, between two rival companies, to see which one would get the Royal appointment - turns out it was the Riverside station, i.e., not the one under the aforementioned bridge); apparently bathers used to wash on an outcrop of land just to the east of the railway bridge, but they were politely told to move by Queen Victoria who could see them baring all just outside her carriage window as she arrived in Windsor!

View of Windsor Castle from the Duck, with the Royal Standard flying to show the Queen was home but only for a social visit.

The Duck actually turned around before reaching the main waterway of Windsor, which was a bit disappointing but we guessed its sole purpose was twofold, i.e. the novelty of a bus floating, and of seeing Windsor Castle so prominently on the hill above the town.

Getting Asian

So following our duck tour, we were of course hungry. The machine dropped us off where it had left us, just in front of the Theatre Royal, so we decided to walk up the hill a little, in the direction of the castle. Greeting us as we went further up were of course the quaint traditionally-fronted shops of old Windsor town, and about a hundred yards uphill, just after the road bared left at the southwesternmost point of the castle, we noted a shopping precinct, but tastefully styled, which disappeared off away from Thames St. Surrounding it were further arrays of cafes and pubs, and of course, a McDonald's. Which we avoided.

On the hunt for something to eat, we happened to stroll past a fudge shop, with eager tourists snapping many photos of the place, but in traditional unimposing British style, we took a step around them and carried on walking... Until a ginger bearded, straw-hat wearing student (we guessed, owing to his hippie appearance) appeared on its doorway and started playing the ukulele! Trying to be subtle, I snapped off a photo, but to my HORROR! he spotted the camera... Well, what is a self-respecting photographer to do but to go into the siren's lair and buy some fudge? So we did. And the guy talked, very quickly, about many things, faster than one could think. Emma quickly fired off "do you have ADHD?" he didn't reply. So three fudge-tastings later (they were all very good, and hard to choose between), we settled for an Eton Mess flavour (I figured three is about the limit one can have trials of food before the shopkeeper gets bored), and left trying to figure out what to do with half a pound of fudge the day of an intercontinental flight!

Music man. Emma's best friend, playing a uke and selling fudge. What a life!

Just down the road from the music man and his fudge, we spotted a nice-looking Japanese restaurant, and on failing miserably at getting through the locked door on the main road, found a side-entrance just around the corner towards the Thames, and arrived in our first experience of an Asian restaurant of the holiday. Being indecisive, we immediately concluded that the lunchtime platter would be ample for our needs, and indeed it was.

Platter at lunchtime, Japanese style. YUM!

Eton is not a mess!

Successfully replenished, we took the advice of a lady we had met earlier on the duck. She had been visiting her son, I can't remember why now, but had decided to take a day of sightseeing. We discovered she was from north Wales, and was very impressed by our knowledge of Llandudno and Criccieth! She told us that Eton College was not far from Windsor, in fact, just over the bridge; I had not realised this, the both of us thinking Eton was somewhere near Cambridge, and not just outside the M25! So we took a short walk through the picturesque streets of Windsor in the direction of the river, crossing a pedestrian bridge, and taking many photographs along the way of the scenery of the riverbank. Lucky it was a sunny day, Windsor really is a lovely place!

The calm streets of Eton, just north of the River Thames; the shopfronts were enough to make anyone feel poor!

Eton College was only a 10 minute walk further along the road, and really surrounded the main throughroad of the town (village?). Its red-brick imposing buildings and gravel courtyards were impressive, and very typical of a private school. Eton's history started as a school for the less well-off, but quickly developed into a highly selective establishment, eventually charging very high prices and demanding very good entrance grades! Scholarships are available, and good ol' Boris Johnson was one such student. The college's grounds were very well kept, viewable from the road just a short walk further north from where the photo below was taken, near the main library. To the left of the main road, impeccably manicured cricket fields are surrounded by red-brick 5-storey student dormitories to the south, and a snaking path to the north giving way to acres of land including football fields spreading out into the distance. We noted that the cricket scoreboard showed that the Eton team had lost to visitors by about 40 runs in their preceding match!

Some of the college buildings in the centre of Eton. We overheard a French tourist seeking information, relaying that the "bibliotheque" was near by, i.e., the library.

 Can we squeeze in a sightseeing trip to the airport?

As if walking around Windsor and Eton wasn't enough to do for the day before a 12.5-hour flight, Emma agreed to take advantage of free bus fares around Heathrow Airport, and we took the bus from Feltham Station to the Central Terminal Area (Terminals 1 and 3; 2 was being re-built). From this main central bus station, we followed a maze of colourfully LED-lit underground corridors, complete with travellators and bright yellow signs, enough to convince even the most dubious that they were in an airport, to the Heathrow Express train station. The Express runs from Paddington station non-stop to Heathrow, for about ₤20 one-way, but it is free between central Heathrow terminals and Terminal 5, so that is where we went. As a regular destination for many of my passengers when I was a taxi driver, I spent many hours at Terminal 5, and had followed its progress when it was being built when I was back in Loughborough. I felt I had an affiliation with the place, because before it was built lay the underdeveloped part of the airport, on the western end between the main east-to-west runways. This was a marshy/boggy area of land, very attractive to migratory birds, to the annoyance of airport staff and jet-engine maintenance crews, called Perry Oaks. It was home to the Heathrow Fire Department at the time, and on work experience I had a chance to visit them, drive a fire engine (indeed chase a landing Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747-400 down Runway 09L!), and even fire the 10-bar pressure foam hose (the "Monitor"). The FD also owned a hovercraft, a Hoverguard 800, for use in case a plane came down in the swamps!

Anyway, arriving in Terminal 5 we walked around a bit, me trying to impress Emma by pointing out the architecture, which by some Pavlovian response immediately induced a yawn in her, I struggle to figure out why! (Sorry Em!). Indeed, the solution to her sudden-onset lethargy by avoiding the subject of tension cables and trusses, and finding a Costa Coffee to get a strawberry ice-cream milkshake to compliment our Eton Mess fudge, while watching the Airbus A320s of British Airways arriving and departing at their gates.

Time to go

Well, our fun had, we returned to the hotel for one final time, via the bus to Hatton Cross from the main station. All packed up, and triple-checked - passport, wallet, keys, phone, toothbrush, tickets! The fleece stayed on, though. Emma relayed a neat trick with luggage, I believe courtesy of Hayley, of attaching a shower bobble to the handle of one's suitcases, to make them more identifiable - so this is what we did! The plan now was for dad to drive us to the airport and wait for us to pass through security, with mum given VIP treatment by Malaysian Airways in the form of a wheelchair, to allow her transit at KL between flights to be made much easier. Dad would then return from the airport to the hotel where he stayed another night, with a radio scanner listening to the control tower and waiting at the western window of the 7th floor, for us to take off (conveniently, due to the wind changing, from runway 09R and thus directly toward the hotel!). We checked-in very easily, and the bags were taken, to be seen next time 6,500 miles away.

The luggage (Rincewind?)

To my delight, a white grand piano with the words "PLAY ME!" written on its music stand, was placed just by the check-in desks in Terminal 4. So after we'd all had our last cups of proper English tea for the next x-number of weeks, I had a go playing a few blues riffs on the piano, unashamedly becoming the loudest sound in the terminal! Just to say it had been done, you know. Music played, and with one solitary round of applause by a guy serving coffee nearby (God bless you sir!) we made our move through the security gates, taking off anything metal, removing electronic items from bags. The most undignified way of walking past security guards is with no shoes on, and ones trousers threatening to fall down! 

A quick trip to Boots to re-stock our liquids, having been prohibited from taking anything over 100ml through customs, we made our way to the gate, with mum leading the way but not walking a step! Arriving at the gate we were ushered straight through, before anyone else boarded. Definitely worth spraining an ankle or something the next time you fly! We were first on the plane, on the lower-deck of the massive A380, and took up our positions in the three left-most seats of row 68, as planned, behind the enormous wing of the plane. Of course by now it was nearly 10 PM so there was little to see out of the window, but we managed to spot Jury's hotel and then the metal arches of Wembley Stadium pass by below us to the left as flight MH-002 climbed out of Heathrow over north-west London and made a right turn to track just south of Luton, passing 27,000 ft before climbing out over the north sea at Harwich. Next stop Kuala Lumpur, on this huge but incredibly quiet double-decked airliner.

Sitting on the left of the plane meant that just about every interesting sight of interest passed by on the other side - but as it was nighttime we didn't miss much. From the right we could have seen Prague and Krakow pass by. I made sure to get up and walk around many times, generally between in-flight movies or episodes of Mythbusters on our fully interactive seat-back in-flight entertainment systems, giving in to general tiredness owing to it being about 0300hrs local time before day broke outside over a cloud-covered Caspian Sea. Before the sun came up, the moving map told us were passing just north of Simferopol, where the troubles were in Ukraine, so I ventured to the starboard stern emergency exit and snapped a few photos to the south, of the lights of the southern tip of that troubled country.

Southern Ukraine, and most likely Simferopol as the bright lights on the horizon, as viewed from the peace of the world's biggest jetliner, at 33,000 ft in the air.

Day dawned over the Middle East, and snow-capped mountains in the northeast of Afghanistan were visible below us, but quickly the scenery changed to a thick layer of cloud passing below us, for as far as the eye could see. By the time the cloud had dissipated, we were well into India, having passed far to the south of the Himalayas and Nepal. By now breakfast had been served, and we were soon to cross into the Indian Ocean over the river delta system of the settlement of Saharabedi far below us. The next land was now about 1000 miles away, to the south-east, the Andaman Islands, meaning we were fast approaching the Far East.

Home away from home

The first signs of making landfall were seen out of our left windows, the coastline of Thailand emerging from the haze just north of the island of Phuket. Out of the starboard stern emergency exit window we saw the island of Langkawi roll by, and saw its very long runway (mentioned very often in the early reports of MH-370), and the beach where we would soon be staying nearby! It was cloudy in KL however, so the city could not be seen out of our windows, but the estuary port town of Klang came into view as we passed to the east of Kuala Lumpur International Airport on the downwind leg, before turning twice to the right and lining up with the runway. By this time we were covered by clouds, but the in-flight entertainment screens switched to the view from a camera mounted in the empennage of the plane, and the four lights marking our glideslope to Runway 36L finally emerged out of the haze (two reds, two whites - perfect, said Emma!). A very good touchdown followed, with a short spell of some very hard braking to meet the taxiway following; finally we were told Selamat Datang ke Malaysia - Welcome to Malaysia! The local time was about 17:50 PM, and the temperature was pushing 30°C, even in the rain! Disembarking from the plane, even via the moving walkway, introduced us to our first taste of Malaysian air. It wasn't that hot, not like previous visits to the country at mid-day in the sunshine, where disembarking from the plane was similar to walking straight into a sauna. The thing that tells you you're abroad is not so much the temperature, or even the stickiness of the humid air, but instead the smell! Malaysian air has a characteristic smell, not easy to describe. It is slightly musty, slightly smoky, and a bit like cooking cabbage. Once you're there for a while you don't notice it, but transitioning between air-conditioning of a car or a building and the outside world you get hit by this sensory overload of heat, humidity and smell! There was a mild whiff of the atmosphere as we walked along the walkway to the terminal building.

We said cheerio to mum, who was popped into another chair by the helpful staff at the airport, ready for her connecting flight in 45 minutes to Kota Bharu; Emma and I continued on to baggage reclaim via a surprise monorail trip, to wait for our pink-bobbled cases, and passed through customs, to end up searching for a way to get to our first hotel, the Concorde Inn KLIA. Emma informed me that taxis could cost up to 100 Ringgit (RM100) for this very short journey, due to gullible and unaware tourists to the area; however a helpful policeman informed us that the Concorde actually had a shuttle bus service every 30 minutes from the coach station below the airport, and this is where we headed next.

We managed to get a bit lost along with a German guy who was on a work trip, due to the fact that KLIA has two pairs of lift shafts descending to different sides of a set of railway tracks - enter the wrong lift and you end up in a railway station, not the bus departure hall! So scratching our combined heads the three of us went back up to where we started and tried the other set of lifts, which magically (and I'm still not entirely sure how), took us to a completely different place (even though there was only 5-metres between lift shaft pairs) and our bus station. Magic! Still clueless.

With a bit of waiting and eventual reading of signs, we found ourselves on the 24-seater coach with the Concorde Inn KLIA logo emblazoned upon it, and after a series of incredibly fast, tight corners from the driver obviously very experienced with driving the short 2-mile route for 14-hours a day, we arrived in the chalet-style single layer sprawling complex of the Concorde Inn, our bags being taken swiftly before arriving at the check-in desk. Passports and details confirmed, we were taken to our room, 906, about 100m from the lobby, and had our first taste of the Malaysian dusk as it fell quickly across the complex, complete with ciccadas chirping and goodness knows what other insects squeaking in the fading light.

Our room was basic, with tiled floor and a sofa, and a very old cathode-ray 20" TV set, but at least it had air conditioning, a safe and a bathroom, not to mention a double bed. Not wanting to give in to tiredness, it being only about 8PM now (1PM UK time), we decided to go to the bar and have a bite to eat, a pint, and a couple of games of pool for want of something better to do. After my first Char Kuay Teow (fried noodles and egg and veg and all sorts) and an authentic chicken satay meal for Emma, she proceeded to thrash me at pool over 3 games before we retired to bed in preparation of heading to KL city the next day.

Spots wins, every time. Drat!