Course correction

Brief note: there was some interesting scuttlebutt that I heard while in Bario regarding Malaysia and the Malaysian govt as a whole--granted, it may be Malaysia's version of biased small towners, but it was still interesting nonetheless--because of the somewhat sensitive nature of the comments, I will not post them until after I am done with Malaysia (if at all). If you are interested, email me.

Well, I had to make another change of plans, this time a little more drastic. On my general sketch of an itinerary, I was supposed to be going from Kuching to Penang. I tried to book tickets on both Air Asia and Malaysian Airlines (MAS--the national carrier) but literally the only option for tuesday, wednesday, and thursday was an Air Asia flight leaving at 9pm, getting in at 11 pm. The only other option for me to generally stay on that itinerary would be flying into Kuala Lumpur and staying the night--the problem is that KUL isn't exactly LaGuardia--about an hour from the city itself--literally in the middle of nowhere--it's only neighbor is Malaysia's only grand prix racetrack.

I was going to go from Penang on to Medan, but I decided to cut out the middleman and am now heading straight to Medan from Kuching on wednesday--getting in at 850 am, and will either stay the night there, or head straight to Lake Toba. I still want to visit Penang, but will either do so after I'm done with Medan, or after I'm finished with Indonesia as a whole--and could fly nonstop from Jakarta to Penang and get in in the morning. The former would mean avoiding flying on an Indonesian domestic airline--which don't exactly have the safest reputation in the world, whereas the latter is the more probable because I am not so sure how Indonesian customs officials would look at someone who entered and left their country in a span of three/four days, and returned three days later.

I know I wouldn't have any problems doing the same in Malaysia--since its geographical location means that plenty of travellers do it and do so quite often. I had no issues reentering Malaysia after leaving the country and spending the day in Brunei. The only issue I might have in the future regarding Malaysia is if I decide to visit Israel before this passport expires--Israeli security might have a long sit down talk with me before I'm allowed to board the airplane.