Sunday 13 May 2012

Finally, my passport

We finally arrived in Kuala Lumpur several hours later than planned. We caught a local train to the centre and headed to the Star Town Inn where we had stayed before. It is amazing here how people working in hotels remember you, even when you stayed there for only a few nights quite some time ago. We went out to Lot 10 and ate til we couldn't possibly eat any more. We had a quiet night and early the following morning we headed off to the Embassy. For once, everything went to plan. We collected my passport, agreed with the Embassy that they were willing to allow us to have both our passorts posted back to the to the Embassy address when our visa application was completed and then we posted both our passports back to the UK. Now we were both without passports in Asia - a wee bit of a scarey thought!
We caught the bus to Melaka to begin the waiting game of having our passports returned to us. We had been told that the actual visa process time was 3-4 working days and to add on a few days for sending them to the UK by courier and recieving them back. The school I went to would have taught me that this would probably mean that our passports would be back in about one week - no chance!
Because we posted the visas on a Friday just before the weekend and the following weekend was Easter during which the Indian Embassy closes for 5 days and then it was back to another weekend we ended up staying in Melaka for just over 3 weeks. As I said previously, although Melaka is a really nice place to visit, it is quite small and can be seen in a few days. I think we would have gone mad staying there for 3 weeks if it hadn't been for the fact that we were staying in the Old Town Guest House which is very comfortable, airey and homely and there are loads of books, magazines and DVD'S that you can borrow. Also it is great place to meet other travelers and swap stories and very reasonably priced. Colin could watch the English football on Saturday and Sunday with Christophe as there is also satelite TV - so that was him happy.
We arrived back at The Old Town Guest House to a very warm welcome from Christophe and Lee Sun. They had prepared us freshly squeezed fruit juice and we sat and had a catch up of where we had been and what we had been doing. As both of then used to travel quite a lot they were interested in hearing our stories.

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