As all my regular readers know, every year
during summer school break, my son, Kenny, and I plan a trip to
a foreign country. In the past we’ve been to Egypt, Turkey and
Thailand, just to name a few. This summer we decided to visit
Malaysia because an acquaintance of mine told me that his
friends had recommended it to him. So we all went, and while we
do not regret having gone, the trip, however, was nothing like we expected.
It all began when I surfed the internet
looking for a Parisian travel site that booked tours to Malaysia. I found one listed on
www.partirpascher.com that offered a reasonably priced
13-night package (Circuit et Plages de Langkawi 3* ou 5*). The
tour was organized by Switch (www.switch.fr)
and included a 5-star hotel. I signed on and they sent me their
paperwork, which included a contract and an invoice.
Everything
was set, until five days before our departure, when Switch
called to reset our package. Apparently they’d been having some
problems with the previous package and were rescinding the
“tours” part of it. Instead, they advised us to use
their reimbursement fees to book private tours on Langkawi
Island. With less than a week to go on our trip, we reluctantly
accepted their offer.
Our airline company was Uzbekistan Airways
flying from Paris to Kuala Lumpur via Tashkent. It was funny
when I asked the check-in clerk where is Uzbekistan on the map.
He looked at me and smiled and told me that it’s somewhere in
the Middle East near Iraq. Nevertheless, the sky journey was six
hours from Paris to Tashkent and when we arrived, we departed
the plane and took a shuttle bus to the correspondence terminal
at Tashkent airport.
The place was like a prison—just a tiny
building with no windows, where everyone sat or slept on the
floor. We waited four hours for our connecting flight to Kuala
Lumpur, which was interesting because most of the passengers
waiting with us were Indians and Pakistani returning home to
their families.
There was an air of unfriendliness towards our
American passports by the locals. Nevertheless, we finally
boarded the airplane and flew another seven hours. We didn’t
arrive into Kuala Lumpur until well after midnight and it was
nearly 3 am before we reached the Hilton hotel.
During our transfer to the hotel, we were
told that our plane to Langkawi would be departing at 11 am later
that morning; thus, we needed to be ready to leave the hotel at
8 am for transfer back to the airport again. When we checked-in,
the hotel clerk asked for our hotel voucher from Switch and it
indicated that we had three nights in the city, but the tour
people told us that we must leave and go to Langkawi the very
next day. Unsure of what to do, we left the next day. However
when we arrived in Langkawi and checked-in at the Berjaya Hotel,
the clerks there said our voucher indicated that we only had
nine nights at Berjaya. Therefore, we had to leave three nights
earlier.
"And where would we be staying and sleeping during those
three nights?" I asked.
We had to continuously repeat the story
of last minute changes from Switch in order to get the French
agency to change their paperwork accordingly. There were nine
people in all from France on this tour, each of us with
different vouchers of hotel nights, all for the same offer.
There were so many errors and problems of communication between
Switch, the tour organizers in Malaysia and our group that we
finally concluded the tours had been cancelled due to customers’
complaints.
All that aside, as fate would have it, we had
arrived in Langkawi on the same day of the London’s terrorist
attacks, July 7, 2005.
Malaysia is a nation of Muslim people and
as Americans we definitely sensed a strange and unfriendly
welcome in the air. Most of the Berjaya Hotel’s customers were
from the Middle East, and others were from India, Pakistan,
Japan, China and Europe. Personally, I found that it is
extremely difficult to act correctly because there are so many
groups of Muslim believers, plus the mix culture of Hinduism.
Every expression seemed suspect, especially in the eyes of the
Malaysians.
As a single Asian woman traveling alone with a child, without
a husband or a male’s partner; a single Asian woman wearing
swimsuits and shorts and tight t-shirts with my long black hair
loose on the shoulders, versus the Arab women covered their body
from head-to-toes in black and Muslim women covered their hair
with scarves, I stood out, especially as they wore the
same thing to bathe in the pool, in the ocean and even on the
beach.
Langkawi page 2...
