Daniele Somenzi's Malaysia

Malaysia with Daniele Somenzi posted by iviaggididaniele [20/01/2009 20:13] We arrive with Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 in Singapore and stay one night at the Stanford Swiss Hotel, a skyscraper of some fifty floors, if not more.

Roberto suffers from vertigo, and when we're at the reception he asks me to get us a room on the ground floor or at least on the lower floors, and to play a trick on him, since he doesn't speak English, I asked the receptionist for a room on the highest floor possible.

The lift went at 40 km an hour; it took three floors to pick up speed and three to slow down.

Roberto got a shock.

As soon as he entered the room he didn't look down and chose the bed next to the wall.

Strangely, skyscrapers have sealed windows you can't open, while this one even has a terrace; my goodness what a thrill looking down, my parachuting instincts tempted me to jump, too bad I didn't have the umbrella.

We visit the city and do some shopping. The humid heat is oppressive and the pool of our hotel, on the sixth floor, cools us down a bit.

The next afternoon we go by coach straight from the hotel to Changi airport, considered for years the most beautiful airport in the world.

I had never taken a Boeing 777 for such a short route, just 1 hour of flight to Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital; besides, no other aircraft could be used since this airline only has Airbus 310 and 380, Boeing 777 and 747, in short only big planes.

Roberto isn't feeling great at departure, he has a kind of shivering despite the air conditioning in the cabin, but then he feels better.

We land at the brand-new airport, it's stunning, nothing like little Fiumicino.

We pick up the rental car we had booked earlier and, driving on the left, leave the airport; the car is a Proton, a Malaysian make.

Soon the signs tell us that Sepang isn't far, we arrive in the blink of an eye, we ask about the parking and a young man who works there tells us the parking coupons are sold out, all already sold, and who would have imagined, where were we going to park the car for the night?

As luck would have it, that young man had one, I mean one of those permits, which became ours without even paying for it, just because we gave him a lift of a few km.

So we head to the parking lot with the ticket code that in the meantime we'd stuck on the car's front windscreen.

Soon it got dark; the humidity and heat really bothered Roberto.

As expected, we put the seats down and dozed in the car all night; at the time of the Formula 1 Grand Prix even thinking of a hotel room was out of the question, and better still we were already at an advantage being 20 metres from the Sepang circuit. We only had to wait for the next day and enjoy the show.

We immediately notice that whoever designed the circuit knows what he's doing: parking everywhere, a road running along the whole circuit for ambulances and various rescue vehicles, palms everywhere to beautify it, and so on.

Around one in the morning Roberto, beside me, nearly kicked the bucket, the humidity was making him ill, so I switch on the car for the air conditioning and he calms down, but he'd already had something since the plane.

Luckily then he slept, and the next morning we enter the automatic gate and voilà, we're inside the circuit on a little hill.

We watch the whole programme unfold, complete with an F16 fighter jet display before the race; Barrichello crashes in the morning practice, what a klutz.

The GP was beautiful, and the noise of the Formula 1 cars is impressive, almost deafening. The heat is killing us; luckily I had a hat, otherwise with my bald head I'd have been cool, or rather roasted.

Once the GP is over, we're straight into our car and merge into the traffic of 50 thousand people heading home. Luckily the airport is only 10 km away.

As soon as I returned the car I was happy, we hadn't had any accidents and everything had gone well; the airport air conditioning made us feel good.

Again we hop on a Boeing 777 and in the blink of an eye we're in Singapore, where the connection for Rome is almost at midnight.