Working from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
After our dive trip Jeremy and I flew to Kuala Lumpur for a couple days en route to Malaysian Borneo for more diving. Both of us had developed some trouble with our ears after the last trip, so we hung out in KL for a while waiting for our ears to get better; I took the opportunity to get some work done.
A few days after our last trip my ears had become sore and I had trouble hearing with one of them, and it constantly felt like it had water in it; Jeremy’s situation was similar. After talking to a guy at the dive shop and doing some research online, we learned we probably had ear infections (apparently a common problem for divers) that could be treated with antibiotic ear drops, and a decongestant to relieve the symptoms.
I think my trouble was caused by being too forceful when equalizing my ears early in the dive trip — after a day or two I began to have trouble equalizing because my eardrums were sore from before. When I first noticed the pain I remembered we had been taught to be gentle when equalizing (don’t force it), but it was already too late. So I think being too forceful ruptured my eardrums and allowed bacteria to enter.
Anyway, after about a week of antibiotic treatment my ears are pretty much back to 100%.
Since we couldn’t dive again for a while I decided to spend the week working in Kuala Lumpur, which has been a great place to work — fast, free or cheap net access everywhere, and minimal distractions because I hadn’t read much about KL before I got here (so I don’t feel like I’m missing a bunch of stuff by not exploring.)
So I haven’t done much sightseeing at all; just went to check out the Petronas Twin Towers one day (the tallest twin towers in the world), and wandered around the city a bit, mostly Chinatown and the Golden Triangle. I don’t have many pics to show for it; I may take some more tomorrow before catching a late flight to Borneo.
One bit of excitement we had here: one night at a hostel in Chinatown, I heard a strange noise (a loud sharp clipping/pinging sound) that I assumed was the air conditioner, and went back to sleep. A few seconds later Jeremy jumped up, bolted from the room and ran down the hallway; I figured he was going to be sick, and didn’t give him very good odds on making it to the bathroom in time because it was pretty far away. He came back a few minutes later and told me he had been chasing a couple guys he had seen crouching at our door, and showed me his laptop cable lock that had been cut in half. (which was the sound I heard)
He had woken up just in time, so the only thing they managed to get away with was about $45 cash. When we told the hostel management about it the next day they were surprisingly nice: we felt partly responsible because we hadn’t chained the door to our room, but they seemed genuinely concerned that it had happened at all, and insisted on replacing the cash. They said they only ever admitted white people to the hostel because they didn’t want locals staying there, copying room keys and coming back to rob the place later.
So we got an inexpensive lesson in being too complacent about security, upgraded ourselves to a hotel ($50/night instead of $17), and counted ourselves lucky.
(as Jeremy noted, one nice thing about travelling with someone with a shiny white Apple laptop is that I could have left my ugly Dell out in the open with a sign that said ‘take me’ and it would have been safe.)
Tomorrow I’m heading to Borneo to do some diving at Sipadan (based out of Semporna); Jeremy headed home a few days ago. There are no multi-day liveaboard trips around Sipadan, so I’ll probably take it easy with the diving, maybe do a day on and a day off, depending how easy it is to work there and how my ears feel.