Chinese New Year Day morning.
After a not-so-merry new year "celebration" under the KLCC Towers, followed by a two-hour nap, I was walking past benches filled by homeless people at Pudu Bus Station, and boarded a early-morning airport bus to Kuala Lumpur Airport.
Time to leave Cambodia as I picked up my luggage from the hostel and was immediately greeted by the waiting Tuk-Tuk driver on the street, who gave me a mystical smile (as God knows how many times in the previous days I had turned him down), who agreed to take me to the airport at a price of 4USD.
So 15 minutes after my first and last dusty Tuk-Tuk ride at Siem Reap, I was by the entrance of Siem Reap International Airport. No, I did walked like 50 meters from the main road, as there was sort of 1 USD Tuk-Tuk entrance fee imposed by the airport.
Winter of 2016.
As an escape to the grueling task of grad school application, I searched online for destinations (and air tickets) that could be my winter getaway. It’s a luxurious 5-week holiday that could possibly be my last.
And I bumped into Xiamen Airline’s offer of round trip to Kuala Lumpur from Hangzhou at a little bit more than CNY1300, with a stop at Fuzhou(福州). The only restriction was that I needed make the return trip on the morning of Chinese New Year’s Day, which wasn’t that much problem for me since I’m reluctant to identify myself as Chinese.
Then, since my last and only exam of the semester was on Jan 12th, and 2 weeks of Malaysia seemed too much for me, I decided to arrange the visit of another country in Southeast Asia during that time. The decision was easy, as Kuala Lumpur is the headquarter of Asia’s budget airlines, and Cambodia, the bureaucracy and corruption in which resulted in unusually high air fares and fees compared with its neighboring countries, is just a short strait away from Malaysia. So my plan of the day was to take Xiamen Airlines flight MF877 to Kuala Lumpur on January 14th, spend the night in Kuala Lumpur Airport trying to get some sleep, and take Air Asia Flight AK536 on the next morning to Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.
