Miss Malaysia and How Pepsi Nearly Ruined Our Lives...

This afternoon, we met a 30-something year old British guy wandering around KL Sentral looking for a cheap place to stay in Kuala Lumpur. Obviously, we recommended our new favourite budget haunt, the Coliseum. Turns out he was saving money so he could stay in KL long enough to win back his old girlfriend. As he put it, his story was "one of long lost love". His lost love, who he'd met in a bar in KL on an earlier trip, had recently been crowned Miss Malaysia! We had no idea whether he was bluffing, but who would lie about something like that? (So we decided to believe him.) He'd been running around all over town trying to give her roses and needed a cheap place to stay to stock up on funds. We wished him luck and decided to keep an eye on the Malaysian tabloids to see if anything ever worked out for him.

Ed. note: And did we ever - a few days later in Tanah Rata we found a front-page spread detailing the apparently non-existent relationship status of Ms. Malaysia...Doesn't look good for British dude:

We, on the other hand, had been running around town with no roses, but 50 lb packs for the whole morning getting things organized to leave KL for the countryside. After cabbing to KL Sentral, price-shopping for an hour, standing in line for 2 hours to book, searching for ATMs and phone cards for another while and realizing that a) Alyssa's shirt had turned from opaque white to translucent white and b) we don't know how to end a sentence, we decided a cold drink was in order.

Pepsi in hand, we grabbed a taxi to the Puduraya bus station and rushed to get tickets for the next bus out of town. In the madness that can only ensue in a bus station in a developing country, we horrifyingly realized the Pepsi in Em's hand had somehow replaced the Lonely Planet Malaysia.

There's only one thing worse than losing your Lonely Planet Malaysia" - realizing you have a chapter on Malaysia in your "Lonely Planet Southeast Asia" which is currently sitting at home after being excised with an exacto knife to cut down on travel weight.

After much swearing (by Em) and poor attempts at cheering-up jokes (by Alyss), we decided to retrace our steps and/or find a bookstore since life could clearly not continue without a Lonely Planet travel guide. Here is the following sequence of non-amusing events:

1. Pudu Hostel across the street to try and buy a copy: Nope.
2. From Pudu manager: "Bookstore? Yeah...there's one on the corner": Non-existant
3. Alleged bookstore on another corner: Also non-existant
4. Finding the right corner to catch a cab (much harder than it sounds)
5. Different street corner to catch a cab...
6. KL Sentral to seach ticket counters in case we left it there (although likely left in the back seat of our first cab)
7. First bookstore in KL Sentral that conveniently had seveal Lonely Planets, including Lonely Planet Maldives, which led to us seriously considering changing our travel plans
8. Second and last bookstore in KL Sentral that rewarded us with a beautiful, shrink-wrapped, glowing LP Malaysia!!!! Yay!!!

We laughed gleefully, jumped around a bit, sang a few choruses of Hallelujah and probably seemed insane to the lady behind the counter! But that just doesn't matter when you have your Lonely Planet back....

-alyss (and transcribed/edited by em)