Friday October 17, 2014
6:20 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I am the proud possessor of a working Olympus camera once more. I went back to Mont Kiara by taxi again, as I hadn’t figured out the buses to get there. It’s funny that I even make taking a taxi difficult. The average person, since they were taking a taxi, would simply take a taxi right outside their hotel. But I knew the route they would follow and how tortuous the streets to get from here to that route. So I walked three or four blocks until I got to the downtown street that goes west and turns into Parlimens Street – the main big road out of downtown that leads right into Jalan Duta, which is the main highway to get us to Mont Kiara. It just seems easier and more efficient to do it that way.

I took another metered taxi. These taxis have big signs on the door saying that they are metered and that haggling is not allowed. The licence picture in this taxi was of a very cleancut and proper Muslim man. The driver was not that person. Perhaps it was the nephew. The driver was a young guy with long, black hair, jewelry, and one leather glove on his right hand. I got the impression he watched a lot of “Transporter” movies. He was an aggressive driver and annoyed me by viciously tailgating other cars on the highway while blowing his horn. He was nice to me and quite polite, but he was a discourteous and dangerous driver.

The taxi fare came to eleven ringgits, the last three or four ringgits of that coming while we were stalled in a traffic jam heading into Mont Kiara itself. The fellow who served me at the Olympus Service Center desk was a bit frantic and inattentive, but he was a nice guy and he took lots of time with me as I went over the camera to see if everything was working and in order. They did a professional job and the camera was cleaned up and wrapped beautifully and they had even folded up and wrapped the strap nicely. There were no major repairs required, so I didn’t have to pay for new parts. They had simply cleaned the sensor, cleaned all the contacts, updated the firmware, and run the camera through all their tests to make sure the stabilization system and everything else was working properly. They insisted that was all they did, yet I wonder. Ever since I dropped the camera when I fell, the grip did not fit onto the camera body precisely anymore. But now it did. I have a feeling that someone did something to get the two parts to fit together again. Updating the firmware set the camera back to its factory defaults, and this led to some amusing moments. I was testing the jog dials on the grip, and I was taken aback when turning the dial didn’t adjust the aperture as it was supposed to do. It changed the exposure compensation setting. This confused me for a while until I remembered that I had changed this setting on the camera. The Olympus is nothing if not configurable, and you can make any button or dial do anything you want. And I had switched the dials so that the front one controlled the aperture. The new firmware reset it so that the rear dial controlled the aperture. As I thought this through out loud, the Olympus tech guy kept saying “Correct.” He pronounced it something like “Keerekt.” This is a verbal twitch I’ve noticed in Kuala Lumpur. A guy in a camping store said “Keerekt” every time I said anything.

They did replace one part. In the smash in Tacloban, I had lost the eyecup. I didn’t even notice it was missing until much later. For the sum of twenty-five ringgit, they put a new one on for me. The total bill came to 115 ringgit, which is about $40. I was very happy to have the camera back.

The best thing about this trip was getting to meet Jerry Wong – the fellow with the Olympus blog. I asked if he was in the office, and he came out to talk to me. He was so different from what I expected. For one thing, he was big, maybe as tall as I am and more heavyset. He was also much more jovial and friendly than I expected. We had a good chat about Olympus cameras. I could have talked to him all day, but I eventually had to let him go and get back to work. I think he can be forgiven for taking the time to talk to fans of his website since his website likely turns a lot of people into steady Olympus customers. Many people jokingly complain in the comments section of his website that Jerry makes all the lenses look so good that every time he reviews one, we all have to go out and buy it. He’s largely responsible for the massive set of Olympus lenses I currently own.

My other goal for the day was to look into getting a lighter mosquito net. For that purpose, I had packed up and brought along the somewhat large mosquito net I currently have. It’s the same net that I bought for the trip to Ethiopia. Ridiculously large for one person or not, I love it. It creates a liveable space inside the mosquito net rather than a tight cocoon where you can do nothing but lie down and survive. Before my trip to Camiguin long ago, I bought a small wedge-shaped mosquito net designed for one person, and it was a disaster. There wasn’t enough material to tuck it under the mattress, so during the night, it would pull out and uncover parts of my body. And it was so small that as I slept, I would end up leaning against the material. This allowed mosquitoes to simply land on the outside of the mosquito net and bite me through the net itself. It was super convenient for the mosquitoes. The mosquito net just turned me into a human burrito for their enjoyment. I ended up selling that mosquito net to someone in Taipei.

However, there were alternatives. There were mosquito nets somewhere in between the single backpacking nets and my huge master bedroom net. I wanted to check those out, and I remembered seeing them at a camping store at the Publika mall. I took a taxi from Mont Kiara to get there, and that was interesting. The first taxi I approached did not have a “no haggling sign.” The driver asked where I wanted to go. I told him, and he said “Ten ringgit.” I had no idea if that was a reasonable fare or not, but it seemed high, and I went looking for another taxi. I found one of the metered taxis and the trip fare on the meter was exactly five ringgits. So the first driver was trying to charge me double. Interestingly, the second driver had no clue about distances. I had a vague idea that Publika was somewhat nearby. I said this to the taxi driver, and he said that it wasn’t that close. He said that it was five or ten kilometers away. I reflected that there was a big difference between five and ten kilometers. And it turned out to be around one kilometer away.

I spent a fair amount of time in the camping store looking at mosquito nets and other gear – all with an eye to making my load lighter. It’s a tough call. I didn’t want to trade my super-comfortable and super-convenient mosquito net for a lighter one that is unuseable. It’s one thing to travel light, but that makes no sense when the light things you have are so light as to be useless. I was looking mainly at the boxnets from a company called Lifeystems. They looked reasonable, but they required four attachment points – one on each corner. And it is difficult to tell how they would work in real life. Plus, I would have to decide between the single and the double version. The single seemed wide enough, but that’s relative to the single bed I have at this Bird Nest Guest House with its tiny rooms. Most of the time, I would have double beds. And how would a small mosquito net work on those beds? I wouldn’t be able to tuck them under the mattress edges. So how would it stay on the bed and cover me? My big one is so big that it can spread out to cover entire rooms! And it only needs one attachment point. The dude at the camping store got out a somewhat accurate scale, and it appeared that my net weighed 800 grams. The single boxnet weighed 400 grams and the double weighed 600 grams. That isn’t a huge savings in weight.

I also looked at silk sleeping sheets to replace my regular cotton sleeping sheet. These sheets are much, much lighter and smaller, but I don’t know how comfortable, durable, and useful they are. I do know how expensive they are, and I walked out of the store having purchased nothing. An interesting sidenote is that the clerk at the store told me that they were having a presentation at the store at seven p.m. on Sunday. Two guys from France that are in the middle of walking around the world were going to come and give a talk. I read a bit of a newspaper article about them. They had left from France with eight people. Six had dropped out and just the two of them were continuing on. They said the usual things about following their dreams, etc. And they said that they had a budget of about two euros per day. I scoffed at that figure. It sounded like a manufactured number. Maybe – just maybe – the sometimes spent just two euros on food per day. But I’m sure that figure didn’t include tourist visas and other similar costs.

Tags: Bird Nest Guest House, France, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Mont Kiara