And relax...

Wednesday, so it must be travel day...

I think a few people must have thought that it was a wrap for the trip as a whole, but yesterday was just the conclusion of one phase. Luang Prabang was something of a bran tub pick for us. L had suggested Chiang Mai and we went along with this, and then I did the old "skyscanner" number of asking the system where we go from there in one flight. After looking up LP, we concluded that it would be somewhere we would love. And it was. We are really hoping to go back to Laos and visit LP again, and other places in what is a beautiful country, but one with many problems in relation to economic and political development.

As to our travel day. Well, perhaps the less said, the better. It started off with queuing endlessly to check in Luang Prabang airport and barely got better from there. The relatively long flight to KL was eased by having booked exit row seats, so at least Mr A had somewhere for his long legs. Once in KL, we had to go through immigration and find our bags and recheck them. This was something of a choice in our part as we could have had our bags checked through, but we decided on balance to treat the flights as two point-to-point flights and check in separately, as we had plenty of time. Immigration in KL was terrible, but what appeared to be an endless queue was suddenly eased by the fact that about 100 PRC tourists in a big group suddenly headed out of the queue when, presumably, someone told them they were in the wrong queue. That reduced what might have been a one hour wait down to about 40 minutes. Re-check in went smoothly, and then we just had to sit around and wait for a while.

Unfortunately, our flight to Penang was delayed, initially by the need to find a new aircraft because of the famed "technical problems", and then because there was bad weather in Penang. Really heavy rain reducing visibility to under 1000 feet. So air traffic control didn't let anything through. When it eventually did, there were more delays and I think we were about 2.5 hours late into Penang. Hard to tell, as my bloody fitbit wouldn't sync to my phone, so I was still working on Laos time... We had another wait whilst our bags were offloaded in Penang (the baggage handlers having been presumably overwhelmed by all the delayed flights coming in and then going straight out again), so by the time we came out our taxi was no longer waiting. Anyway, that didn't matter as a standard prepay taxi did us fine, and there was no more waiting.

We're staying in the most beautiful place in the Penang - the Seven Terraces Hotel. We have been here before - for dinner with L, and as part of the desire to return to Penang with functioning legs, we also wanted to stay at the Seven Terraces as a real treat. I'll try to post some extras of the buildings here as the days go by, but the website gives a taster. Anyone who travels to George Town should definitely try to stay here!

A very tiring, and quite annoying day, culminated in a quick (but very cold) beer in a Love Lane bar. And relax...

PS I'd also like to add that this isn't because I wasn't relaxed before, but just after a frustrating day....