Day 4 in Genting

We finally returned to our rooms at 1:30 am, RM 20 poorer, but now wise with the knowledge that shoes are important in Genting. We were to leave Genting by the 8:30 taxi, and working backwards, I realised that assuming a 30 minute walk to the Skyway station, and another 30 minutes on the Skyway cable car itself, we would need to have checked out and breakfasted by 7:30. In other words we would have to pack, shower etc etc by 6:45 or so, to maximise our breakfast time (it was a buffet after all, and as you may recall, I'm a cheapo). My point is, we would have have to wake up by 6:00… in a little over 4 hours time.

Given our sleeping habits and our level of tiredness this would be flat out impossible, so we decided to stay awake. And what better way to stay awake than by playing cards. We decided to play 'teen patta' (or 3 cards) - a version of poker. Our experiments with gambling had gone awry earlier in the evening, so we played using cards from another pack as chips. So we played and played, and after some time the thin mountain air and our collective exhaustion caught up with us, and we were laughing and rolling around clutching or stomachs more than looking at our cards. How not to, when Sa's dad referred to his cards as "Eli Settha Naatham" (or whatever). This translates to cards which stink worse than a dead rat, and are since then being referred to as ESN cards.

We got sick and tired of the cards by 4:00 and Vi fell asleep, soon followed by his mum. Sa a little after that, and I tried to stay up by watching some silly movie on TV. That bored me even more and I crashed out soon after.

Fortunately, my alarm rang at 6:00 and I roused the others. We all sleepily went about our morning routines and were right on schedule at breakfast. Stuffed ourselves there, walked the long walk to the skyway and enjoyed another breath-taking ride back down. Ibrahim (the driver) arrived 5 minutes after we got down, right on time, and we slept our way back to KL, arriving at 9:30.

Our train to Singapore was for 2:30 pm, so we had some time to kill. I had a business meeting to attend that morning, so we kept our bags back at Corus hotel (bless them), and I made my way by LRT to Petaling Jaya (just outside KL). The others went to take in the view from the 41st floor at Petronas Towers. They enjoyed this very much, and after lunch we all got back together at the KL Sentral station. Train was right on time. We all fell asleep almost immediately, and only woke up back in JB when it was time for Immigration. This time was fairly painless, and even Singapore (aside from one anal official) was not a problem.

Arrived at Singapore station (Tanjong Pagar) at 10.00 pm, about an hour later than expected, and this concludes this tale of adventure and intrigue.