Well, as you’ll gather from my posts on other threads, we’re safely back in Oman now although not entirely ecstatic at having left NZ. The journey back was rather long and drawn out, as you’d expect, but generally OK. I don't know if it's peculiar to Malaysia Airlines, but every one of our flights, coming and going, has been late taking off :-/. We finally managed to catch up with our hotel voucher (mentioned above) in Kuala Lumpur airport (KLIA) and, despite being a 5* hotel, like the hotel on the trip out, it was very dingy in some areas. I don’t know if it’s the dampness in Malaysia that’s the cause but quite a few places looked like they could desperately do with a makeover. One thing that annoyed us with the KLIA/hotel arrangement was that both times we had to wait over half an hour for a minibus to take us to the hotel, which was about 45 mins. away. There is a tourist-geared service at the airport that delivers people to certain hotels and I’m not quite sure how it works or why the transit hotels are situated so far from the airport. I recognised the driver we’d had on the journey out, but assumed he wouldn’t be taking us this time as it was a different hotel and he was just hanging about doing nothing. In the end, it
was him that took us so we can’t understand why we’d been made to wait around for so long, especially having just got off an 11-hour flight. They seem to treat their clients very casually and make no effort to help you on your way to a therapeutic shower and comfy lie down. Although we’d landed around 8 p.m., it was more like 10.30 p.m. when we arrived exhausted at the hotel
.
After an early breakfast we were back on the minibus on our way to the airport again. We didn’t realise that we would be calling at another hotel to pick up more passengers but that was fine, until we found ourselves waiting outside in the heat for 30 mins.
while said passengers (a party of 4 Indian guys) took their time vacating their rooms. One of our co-passengers became somewhat enraged and verbally attacked the driver
, which, at least, livened things up a bit for us. There was no apology for having kept us waiting nor for having curtailed my shopping experience in KLIA :D.
We had a long wait in Dubai airport before we could fly the last leg to Oman. This was puzzling as there were several much earlier flights going to Muscat we could have got on. Was it the dastardly Mary that had a hand in that, too? Even if she didn’t, she certainly did when we came to check in with Oman Air. Although I held a ticket, I didn’t appear on the passenger list because Mary hadn’t confirmed my booking with them. Hubster was OK for some reason, but I wasn’t going to be allowed to travel. That @#$%*& woman had managed to blight every step of our journey to NZ and back again. I just couldn’t believe it. However, fortune smiled on me (for once 8-)) and there was a vacant seat on the plane (very lucky as it’s only a small plane and was the last flight of the evening) so I could travel after all.
Shame that my relief came to an abrupt end when we got off the plane in Muscat to find several other planes had landed at the same time and we had to queue for 2 hours to get through immigration. It’s taken us much longer to get over the journey this time, compared to last year when we went to NZ with another travel agent and another airline. I guess we’ll be going a different route next time in both respects ::).