Iberian Spring: Day 0-1; Perth, Kuala Lumpur, Karaburun

Soundtrack: every song by every band about spending time in airports and travelling (on repeat)

So it begins again.

Having spent 4 months back in the real world of day jobs, traffic, kicking against the pricks and generally just doing what has to be done these days, it’s time to dust off the passport. It’s been a long few months, so this break is very welcome.

It’s a crazy old world out there. Flight tracking maps have a couple of vey obvious gaps, and we’re heading right through those to the other side. We’ve had to do some last minute flight changes to keep out of the way, including changing the flight at the centre of the whole plan.

Last year L found a unicorn flight: Qatar business class on points from Barcelona to Perth, at the end of school holidays. These tickets don’t happen often, especially not a flight with two seats. So we put down our carefully hoarded points and planned for Spain.

Thanks to some unrest around the Persian Gulf, apparently there’s a war going on that has possibly already been won, or still has a ways to go, and nations other than the US and Israel may or may not need help to finish. It’s so hard to tell these days with what keeps getting announced. Is it responsible to be travelling at this time? Maybe, maybe not. On one hand it’s consuming resources that are likely to get more scarce. On the other, all around the world are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on people travelling around the world.

I’m sure I’ll revisit this over the course of the trip. Interesting times finished some time ago, we’re now into the bugfuck crazy era. So one person’s irresponsibility may well be another’s lifeline. I think the world right now needs more people getting out there meeting each other, preferably while wielding boarding passes not guns.

Smile, I’m travelling.

Some plans work, some don’t. One day I’ll learn that if there’s a chance of something not quite working out, it’s tripled if a budget airline is involved. And if it eventuates, the staff will likely be less helpful. As a result it’s 430am, I’m sitting in a little airport eatery in Kuala Lumpur having a cold tea Tarik and a small plate of bihun goreng, on the wrong side of the transit line, waiting for 6am to roll around so I can check my suitcase for the next leg.

(To be fair, we’d had to book two separate tickets as the system didn’t want to put our flights on single tickets, but then the Perth assistant assured us the suitcase would be checked through to Istanbul. Sadly it wasn’t so here I am.)
Due to it being a long stopover we booked an airport hotel, so to avoid totally wasting that booking L is there now while I wait until I can check the case — they’ll let you through customs 6 hours before your flight, but you can only check luggage 4 hours before. Meanwhile there are signs all over the airport about making sure you check in nice and early. I’m learning that the Malaysians have a bureaucratic streak I didn’t notice before.

So not the best start to the trip, but smile, I’m travelling.

First flight was fine for a red eye. After a drink and some decent chips at the Matso’s airport bar it was time to board. We ended up with a spare seat between us though the plane was rather full. There were a couple of very energetic small people in the row in front, but fortunately they settled fairly quickly. Reading for the start of the trip is Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls. While I had a physical copy in my hand luggage, the overhead racks were jammed tight so it was easier just to download a free public domain copy — apparently it’s in the public domain in Canada so if his estate come looking for me I’m blaming them. Can’t say I’ve ever been the biggest Hemingway fan (one of the only high school English texts I didn’t read from cover to cover was Old Man and the Sea) and to be hones, at about 100 pages in I can’t say that For Whom is going to swing my vote. So far the protagonist has talked a lot, looked at a bridge, had sex, talked a lot about not shooting someone, and sat in a stream listening to a woman who he describes repeatedly as ugly. And for all that talking, if I was the editor I would have sent it back again. The protagonist basically just keeps asking versions of “but why?” while the others fill in gaps. Every character basically sounds the same, except for some whose dialect means they say “”thee” and “thou”, but aside from pronouns there’s not a lot of distinctive voice.

And I don’t think there’s been a single bell.

Stay tuned for more modern takes on literature.

Flight meal was Uncle someone’s Chicken Rice. It was okay, the rice was overall not too bad, but the chicken was airline quality, dry and mostly tasteless. I’m hoping that this isn’t the start of a chicken rice curse on this trip: at KL airport I was going to get some chicken rice for breakfast but the shop only took orders via an app, and I wasn’t going to burn an eSIM just for breakfast. (I ended up activating the eSIM anyway just to check in on how L was faring on the other side, yay for $3 eSIMs.) But with 2 days in Singapore at the end of the trip, I declare the chicken rice curse stops here.
My breakfast bihun goreng was okay, slightly better than it needed to be for an airport. At least it was freshly cooked, had some flavour, and hit the spot as I didn’t feel like a big punchy flavourful dish like nasi lemak. the tea Tarik was also good, just what I needed to keep things going.

I might be tired and slightly numb, but I couldn’t help but take a pic of a big sign for Malaysia’s No 1 Tiger Milk Mushroom beverage. I know that I sometimes throw out words at random, but never tiger, milk, mushroom, and beverage together. I’m not sure I want to consume milk that has come from either a tiger or a mushroom, and I might be cynical but anything that refers to itself as a “beverage” fills me with suspicion and trepidation. File under WTF.
Time for me to gather myself and face the check-in again. Crossing the fingers things will go smoothly and I can get a couple of hours transit side and horizontal, or at least have a shower and change of clothes.

As if by magic, all the resistance dropped at 6am, 4 hours before the next flight, and the path restward opened. Air Asia could accept my suitcase, and I dragged my ever weary carcass through customs, ending my 3 hours in Malaysia and taking me back to that mythical inbetween land called transit. The transit hotel was exactly where L said it was. Finally horizontal, I was in my own state of transit: so very tired yet my body was also sending signals that this was the time I usually get up in the morning. Exhaustion won eventually, and my wish for a couple of hours of sleep and a shower came true.

L grabbed me an ice coffee while I got some chocolate for the next flight crew. Dewar’s is apparently a good prestigious brand of whisky, as I was caught in a queue behind a Chinese family buying about a year’s supply. We had another security check to get through, so I slurped down my chilled cow milk caffeinated beverage double time leading to a wonderful icecream headache — it seems headaches don’t set off airport scanners.

We’d picked our flight plan to check out Air Asia’s premium economy lie flat seats, available on the KL to Istanbul flightpath. I’m tapping away at this blog from one of them now, and they are pretty nice. While they do lie flat, mine at least doesn’t want to go to a full 180 degrees, so I could lie flat but slightly uphill, so at the end of my nap I’d drifted slightly downhill. They are still economy-class width seats, so I can lie on my side fine but it’s a bit squishy lying on my back. The middle armrest tray table has probably the smoothest, easiest extraction/retraction I’ve experienced, just pull out and presto, no skills-test trying to find the right angle, just to double test I was able to extract it left handed without any issue. The premium economy ticket comes with a complementary meal, so I’ve had a fairly decent though sadly no-one’s uncle’s nasi lemak that had a decently punchy sambal and crunchy ikan bilis. Given all this and a pricetag much cheaper than a full business class, I’d definitely fly it again, though it would be great if Air Asia could somehow get their ticket system to accept mixed class bookings so we didn’t have to do this on separate tickets. But for budget premium economy it’s decent.

Update on For Whom the Bell Tolls: more walking, more sex, and an obscenity-load of obscenity talking. Lots of folks wanting to obscenity in the milk of obscenity everything. I get that this was published in 1941 so it’s not going to use actual unladylike language, but for obscenity’s sake, it has aged about as well as an obscenity in the milk. And the repetition, omg the repetition. I get that it’s a work of literature but the repetition. I know writers who agonise over using “the” or “a” twice on the same page (hyperbolic shout out to AG Slatter) who I can only having an apoplectic fit and smelling salts overdose at Papa H’s endless repetition. And it’s not just artistic effect repetition, like the nowhere sex scene (“for him it was a dark passage, which led to nowhere, again to nowhere, then again to nowhere … “) but reading our protagonist (hereafter to be described as a “real nowhere man”) literally having the same thought over and over again (and over and over and over again, and over and over and over and over again, as if he was obscenity pulling thoughts out of his milking obscenity nowhere). Then there’s the “ugly” woman, who seems to exist only so the nowhere man can have someone to argue with. 200 pages in and the bridge hasn’t made another appearance. And still no obscenity milking bells.

Speaking of milk, Following my nap I’m enjoying a chicken rendang and cheese wrap with a cendol sugar milk and bean tea, and for budget airline food it’s both tasty and reasonably priced (our tickets only covered the 1 complementary no-one’s uncle’s meal).

The rest of the flight was a mix of napping and reading: spoiler alert, I finished the book, everyone ends up dead or miserable (including the reader) and I can now tick off another classic read. While I’m sure that there are classic literary devotee folks smarter and more read than me who would cringe at my 2026 hot take on it, I’m fairly sure such folks probably have better things to do than read this blog. And who knows, in 80 years time someone might stumble across these words and do the 22nd century equivalent of cringe at these thoughts. But at least if I put bells in the title, the reader is gonna get actual bells.

Our creative itinerary means we landed at Istanbul’s other international airport (SAW), on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, and then caught the shuttle bus to the European side (IST) to get our lift to our hotel in Karaburun, on the Black Sea coast. The highway/freeway between the two airports was a good smooth ride, took about an hour (though guides do recommend allowing for 2 hours in peak traffic). When we were here in 2024 I gushed at being able to take a ferry from Europe to Asia, and then back again, and I was similarly excited to be doing the crossing of continents in a bus this time. If you’re not a geography head, that’s ok. But I get joy from crossing any type of geographical border — I’m still yet to walk across a national border — and crossing these at close to sea level gives me a buzz.

Karaburun seems to be a little seaside town to the north of Istanbul. I don’t know how Turkish localities work, whether it’s considered just a suburb of Istanbul or something else (a quick flick over to wikipedia calls the place a “municipality” which could really mean anything). It has a promenade and some jetties, some restaurants, and some shops. There’s also a bit of building happening, so maybe it’s going to be the next big thing. They’ll need to improve the main road into the place first, it’s quite bumpy and winding, and there were times I really felt for the shock absorbers of our once glorious VIP minivan. After checking in, L and I took a stroll along the promenade, and it’s kind of crazy to look out over the Black Sea and know there is only open water between us and Ukraine. Karaburun is also a great place to watch planes coming in to land, and they were coming thick and fast every couple of minutes.

Spoiler alert: the Black Sea isn’t black all the time, but it is at night.

Dinner was at a local well reviewed restaurant, where we had some wonderful kofta, menemen, and fries. The kofta was slightly juicy, not dry; the menemen was a wonderful balance of tomato, capsicum, spices and eggs, and the fries were good and crunchy.

Tomorrow we’re off to Lisbon where we’ll have a few days of trying everything Portuguese: salt cod, custard tarts, big and crazy sandwiches, much pork, and of course port. After our amazing race so far, it’ll be good to get more than 18 hours in the same place.