The Long Way Home

We can’t really procrastinate any longer. Australia is too close to fit in another stop on the way there.

A stinking hot walk to the coffee shop. The pictures say it all.

Marti walks on Kuta beach.

Pocari was a wrestler. Apparently suggesting a drink is similar to his sweat is not a bad marketing exercise.

Kavli. Hearty, thick Kavli…

We had a horrible coffee at the ‘world’s best airport’, Kuala Lumpur, before heading to Ubud where we found a latte BETTER than I remember Melbourne’s!

Flying over the equator.

A spectacular, and spectacularly wet, morning walk with Peter up a ridge between two raging rivers.

Just before leaving Australia in 2004,I spent weeks working on an architectural scene in Kuala Lumpur for my employer. It was a view of the centre with a newly constructed hotel by the new Sentral Station, with the Petronas Towers in the background showing close proximity of the hotel. Most of the scene was incomplete, including an absence of logos to the building top, electricity not supplied to the rooms, scaffolding, unfinished train station and more. I lived in that scene for days at a time, turning on lights (copying illuminated windows from elsewhere), creating the logos and attaching them, placing monorail carriages on the lines, and generally cleaning up a massive construction site.

Last night I found myself walking around this scene. Our hotel room looked over it and not much had changed – they seem to have completed what I did in Photoshop over six years ago. It was very surreal, like being a Lego man in a 3D version of a giant scene that I’d painfully worked over in 2D and knew every square millimeter of.

Nearly back in Australia, it’s been a full circle.

The Le Meridian and Hilton hotels and KL Sentral station. A new construction site has replaced a parking lot which I had tidied up so long ago on a Macintosh computer.

Flying in to KL – still north of the equator (just) but not far from the southern hemisphere now.

Hotel view.

No Duratrans? You’re on camera too.

Roti for breakfast. Can we stay another day???