| Early morning at the airport; Malaysia-bound |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|11:07 am] |
We left the house in the unusual dark and quiet of 4:30 on a Saturday morning. The streets were empty, save for a few stray dogs, and our neighborhood took on a slightly eerie aspect. We walked up our normal street, hoping to come across a taxi. Not three blocks up, a taxi rolled slowly through an intersection and, spotting us with our bags, made a U-turn around the intersection and picked us up. I asked the driver to take us to Taipei Main Station. He asked what our final destination was; I told him the bus station, to catch a bus to the airport. I used the wrong word for airport, but he got the idea. We didn't talk much more than that.
From the bus station, we hopped on an airport-bound bus just as it was leaving and made it to the airport with enough spare time to doze among the early morning departures and arrivals before our check-in desk opened. The place felt muted, as if the airport itself had just woken up, or perhaps come from a long flight and still couldn't hear properly. I sat with my green canvas backpack between my feet, slouched down to rest my head on the back of the chair, staring toward the ceiling.
Through some minor oversight, I realized upon touch-down that our flight had made a stop at Kota Kinbalu, not two hundred miles from where we wanted to end up on the same island. We could have just gotten off the plane there and caught a bus over to Miri, had I realized ours was not a direct flight. But instead, we had to get back on the plane to fly another two hours to Kuala Lumpur, only to wait three hours and hop on another flight back to Borneo. The one advantage to our circumbendibus was that Valerie made the acquaintance of a young woman from Borneo while we waited for our two-hour-delayed flight to Miri.
Our Asia Airlines (the Ryan Air of Asia, but not as cheap) flight touched down on the wet tarmac of the Miri airport just after eleven. Perhaps owing to the price of our tickets, we were not afforded an actual disembarkation gate. Instead, we received a flight of stairs and a pile of loaner umbrella for walking to the terminal. From the door of the plane, looking down over the jet black tarmac, shimmering with the airport lights in the dark and the rain, the red umbrellas with their white script looked like ladybugs fleeing two by two for shelter.
The woman Valerie had met earlier was kind enough to offer us a ride into town, which saved us an expensive half-hour taxi ride. Her husband was picking her up at the airport, and we stopped at her parents' house to drop something off, so we got to meet this random lady's mother. All in all a very strange convenience.
Fortunately for us, the lady even knew where our hotel was, so we got dropped off right in front. The distracted night porter checked us in. The place felt like it had been mostly finished; whoever was building it had decided that it was good enough to stop there. Our room was clean, if a bit old, and smelled faintly of smoke - more than adequate after a full twenty hours' journey. In the humidity and dried-on sweat of carrying bags through this new-found heat, I owed myself a shower before sleep. The water heater for the shower looked to be about the size of a shoebox, as it huffed and puffed its way into delivering some water. The little water heater that could, trickled out bursts of water like a steam engine climbing a hill. And all the time with this horrible death hum, like it was truly on its last legs. Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug... |
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