Have Perut Will Travel...: KUL to BKK │ KLIA to Suvarnabhumi!

Bangkok!

Indonesia was first in our list of ASEAN countries to visit, and so Thailand is our second destination, starting off with its capital city of Bangkok.

We bought our flight tickets to Jakarta during a recent MATTA fair and got a fairly good deal. Our return tickets cost us approximately RM800.00 each (approximately USD180/EUR166).

Brendan had just commenced the second semester of his post-graduate studies, and he was totally bummed that he could not join us this time around.

Brendan drove us to KL Sentral's KL City Air Terminal at noon. As always we bought our train tickets online and enjoyed RM10.00 off each ticket, so it only cost us RM40.00 each (approximately USD9/EUR8).

This is important to note since the only way to gain access to the KL City Air Terminal was with the KLIA Express tickets. We scanned our train tickets at the turnstile and voila! We were in. For now KL City Air Terminal caters to only Malaysia Airlines (MAS), Batik Air and KLM.

We submitted our yellow submarines for a security check before checking it in. Our bags weighed 29kgs in total, well within the allowed total of 40kgs. Learning our costly lesson from a previous overseas trip we made sure to purchase additional luggage allocation for our return trip.

We then exited the KL City Air Terminal and walked across past the KLIA Express turnstiles using the same train tickets. The train soon arrived fifteen minutes later.

The train departed KL Sentral at 12:40pm and arrived in KLIA half an hour later. We rode an elevator up to Level and strolled along the food court here, Food Garden.

The enclosed environment did not appeal to us, so we continued up to the Departure floor and strolled around for a little while before settling on Nooodles for lunch. Here we ordered the:

Dim Sum
Loh Mai Kai
Spring Rolls
Iced Tea
Sour Plum Juice

for a grand total of RM76.50 (approximately USD17/EUR16) that unfortunately attracted a 10% service charge and 5% sales and service tax. For the life of us we did not know what the difference between the two charges were!

MH774 was due to depart at 4:20pm from Gate G4, so with two hours to spare we made our way to the Departure hall.

We breezed past the Immigration checkpoint vide the new MyBorderPass auto gates without incident, and by time we emerged it was 2:30pm.

We then decided to while away some time at Dunkin Donuts, seated right in front of Gate G6. We were allowed in at 3:20pm and five minutes later navigated past the final security checkpoint.

We then took our seats and were finally allowed to board the plane at 3:40pm. The flight was surprisingly not full, and the final group of passengers boarded at 5:00pm.

There was a delay when a passenger did not turn but had already checked in her luggage. The ground staff took some time locating her bag in the cargo hold before MH774 was cleared for take-off.

The plane finally pushed back at 4:38pm and after some time taxiing onto the runway the plane eventually took off at 4:55pm.

The two-hour flight was largely uneventful, and the plane began its descent at 6:25pm. MH774 touched down at 5:55pm local time.

Kudos to Captain Lim and Chief Steward Shahrul for an excellent flight. We disembarked 10 minutes later and headed to Carousel 19 to collect our luggage.

Welcome to Bangkok!