2006 retirement trip

Malaysia April 16 to April 19

Saturday 15 April, 2006 We catch an Austrian Airlines 777 from Vienna at 11:00 which takes us over Tehran in Iran. This is surprising because, as we know, Iran is part of the axis of evil. We travel for 5 hours in daylight.
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 Saturday 15 April, 2006 Our 777 flies over Romania and from my window seat I can see the extreme flooding from recent rains. Romania appears to be undeveloped when compared with the rest of Europe. The flight continued over the Black Sea to Turkey.
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 Saturday 15 April, 2006 There was high cloud cover and Turkey disappeared beneath us. When the cloud cleared we were over Tehran. It took about 10 minutes to fly over it. There was a lot of green, fed by water from the 13000' peaks of the Elburz Mountains to the north. These mountains formed around 35 Mya when Arabia collided with Eurasia.
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 Saturday 15 April, 2006 Tehran was so big because it is a city of 12,000,000 people and US motorists are making it rich. We flew over Afghanistan in daylight over the most dismal landscape ever. Night fell as we flew over Pakistan and into India.
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Sunday 16 April, 2006 Then our flight took us over the Bay of Bengal to Kuala Lumpur where we arrived at 04:00 on Sunday April 16. Flight time was 11 hours and we were exhausted. It had been a continuous rush since leaving Munich.
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 Sunday 16 April, 2006 We caught a cab (that got lost and we had to give him directions) and checked into the Le Meridien at KL Sentral. It was still dark when we got there and this is what it looked like from our room. After the flight we had about 4 hours sleep.
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 Sunday 16 April, 2006 Our room is on the 27th floor and Taman Tasik Perdana park is below us. It was built in the 1880's and measures 104 hectares. The Malaysian Houses of Parliament building is visible diagonally up from the lake.
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 Sunday 16 April, 2006 Very fancy apartments in the KL Sentral area below the hotel.
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Sunday 16 April, 2006 The lobby of the Le Meridien.
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 Sunday 16 April, 2006 Easily the best hotel we had the whole trip, and only $140 per night.
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 Sunday 16 April, 2006 We caught the monorail from KL Sentral Monorail station into the city where we visited the twin towers.
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 Sunday 16 April, 2006 The Petronas Twin Towers Malaysia were the world's tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004. We returned to the Le Meridien, made a few Skype calls, had dinner and 12 hours sleep.
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Tuesday 18 April, 2006 We spent Monday 17 doing some last minute shopping in KL and had a generally relaxing day. On Tuesday April 18 we decided to head for the airport Concorde hotel and spend our last night there. This is the room.
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 Tuesday 18 April, 2006 It was a long bus ride from the airport to the Airport Concorde in Sepang. Big mistake, it was in the middle of nowhere and was an old style motel.
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 Tuesday 18 April, 2006 As it turned out, it didn't matter anyway because we needed the rest. Wednesday April 19, nearing the end of our adventure, we set the alarm for 2AM to catch a cab to the airport.
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 Wednesday 19 April, 2006 We checked in easily and boarded the Austrian Airlines 777 at 4:30AM for the flight to Sydney.
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Wednesday 19 April, 2006 7½ hours later, we were in Sydney. We wheeled our enormous trolley full of stuff to the cab rank and I said to the cabbie, "How's Mt Colah sound?" "I'll take you wherever you wanna go mate". We were home. END OF OUR RETIREMENT TRIP Best shots of the trip.
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Best shots of the tripNext: Best shots of the trip Germany April 12 to 14Previous: Germany April 12 to 14
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