Destination Penang (finally) — A journey to Penang #3
A flight to Kuala Lumpur. An airport to hotel transfer. A week’s break that’s a part of the journey but not the final destination. Done it before. But not like this.
No swanky limousines this time. We get transported in a thing alarmingly like a police van (thankfully minus leg irons and cuffs, although nothing would surprise me now that common sense has become obsolete). I’ve stayed in some pretty nice hotels, and this one isn’t at all bad, but it’s like entering a ghost town — empty, deathly quiet and downright creepy. The only people we see are a few staff members drifting about in the sort of outfits you wear if you’re expecting a nuclear attack.
The Grand Millennium will be our prison for the next 7 days. We’re extremely lucky that the Malaysian government reduced the quarantine period from 14 days only two weeks earlier.
We do have a view from our locked room — or two rooms actually as we’d booked two adjoining — down to Jalan Bukit Bintang. A whole world is going on out there that I can’t wait to become a part of, but we have to stay here, with no access to a laundry, no room cleaning and our meals left on a chair outside the door. All prisoners need exercise, but we’re denied a yard or even a corridor. I shall assign the end of one of these nice, big rooms as a dance area. Thank you, laptop, YouTube and foresight.
By Day Four of our incarceration, I’ve shifted the sofa out of the way to make my dance studio bigger. Doing Latin barefoot on a carpet isn’t to be recommended, but it’s a much needed workout.
The staff at the Grand Millennium hotel are used to providing excellent and friendly service to guests and they’ve been dumped in it just as much as we have. To be fair, they’ve tried hard to make the best of a bloody awful situation. The lady (in a fall out suit) who comes on Day Four to stick yet another cotton wool bud on broom handle into my sinuses is very sweet and apologetic. The catering staff provide us with a commendable variety of meals, if in unnecessarily huge portions. Three full meals a day plus afternoon cakes and sandwiches is too much when you’re sitting around with nowhere to go and it’s such a waste. I hate having to leave plate-loads of uneaten food outside the door — where are dogs when you need them? Please note that this comment is not at all a reflection on the quality of the food. The meals are mostly a tasty mix of east and west and I long to be able to thank the kitchen staff for their efforts. For us it’s only a week but they’ve had to run the show like this for months now and there’s no end in sight.
The seven days pass surprisingly quickly. I’ve always been good at entertaining myself, so I work on my blogs and stories and create my own little art projects on Photoshop, read a lot and watch Netflix. Friends told me I’d probably just sleep because I’d be jet lagged, but here’s the thing — I don’t get jet lag. When I first started travelling long haul across the world I got to know that upside-down feeling and the lying awake, buzzing, at 2am and it’s exhausting, but then in 2004 I made a trip from England to New Zealand with the sole purpose of buying a house. I had two weeks in which to find one and kick off the purchase process and I literally hit the ground running in Auckland. It appears there’s nothing like a bit of panicked focus to totally eradicate jet lag. And I’ve never been clobbered by it since.
So now it’s Freedom Day — the 18th November 2021. A Fall-Out Suit Man accompanies us to the deserted reception area and — hooray! — a normally dressed woman signs us out. Now we’re ready to be driven (in a normal car) on the final leg of the journey to Georgetown. It’s not quite all normal though. I’m no longer a maximum security detainee but I’m labelled ‘Person Under Surveillance’ and will be for the next seven days.
The drive northwards to Penang is pleasant and calming. At last, time to forget, time to start moving on. When you see scenery like this you know you’re in SE Asia.
And so onto Penang Island.
#malaysia #grandmillenniumhotel
