Travelling with pre-schoolers, part 2
Hotel dramas, and doing things differently post-holiday
We left Kuala Lumpur and headed to Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, Borneo. Kuching turned out to be the highlight of our trip, but it very nearly wasn’t.
We travelled all morning, with taxis and a domestic flight from K.L, to get to the old town centre of Kuching, showing up to a very old, colonial-era hotel. The lobby looked auspicious enough – tiled floors, hotel staff bustling around loading all of our baggage onto a trolley, people sitting around in booths, and a café in the corner. But it turned out people might’ve been sitting in the lobby for a reason. We went up to our room and opened the door to the stench of mould. As we wandered around the large apartment (the size of it had been appealing in the first place!) we found ripped and stained carpet, with dark spots – had someone been murdered in there? – and mould crawling its way up the windows. There was no fridge despite it being advertised, and the kitchen was just an ancient bench top in a cubby-hole. I had antibiotics in a cooling bag for O, and was desperate for a fridge. The kids were oblivious, running around the place and scattering their toys and clothes everywhere.
We went back down to the lobby and asked for another room. This one had a fridge, which when switched on, absolutely reeked of mould. The whole room did. I was despairing. I had a child with a chest infection and I also have asthma so wouldn’t have been able to sleep in there. We traipsed over to a mall on the other side of the square and looked for food the kids would eat. I noticed a French couple hovering in the wine section of the supermarket, debating which bottle of wine to take to their presumably nice hotel… so I asked where they were staying. “A hotel in this building,” the man replied, and to my strange questions about its hygiene – “and yes, it’s clean”. So we trekked again to find this new hotel that was hopefully going to be a beacon in the growing darkness, as the kids’ bedtime approached. The clerk printed out the information for me – we could all stay in one room on the first night, then they could move us into a ‘family room’ for the next three, with two rooms and a lounge. Goodbye Merdeka Palace, hello Waterfront Hotel.
I felt a huge sense of gratitude, as I set the kids up for bed, and my husband hauled everything over from the other place, taking over an hour to come back. It’s one thing staying in grungy places when you’re travelling on your own, it’s another exposing your (sick) children to toxic mould and ancient air conditioners in desperate need of a clean. Over the next few days, we got to know the daily rhythms of this hotel – they had designated times for the sweeping buffet breakfast (which we of course took lunch from as well) then ‘afternoon tea’ – which was served in another room from 1-4pm, and evening drinks with free booze and supper from 5pm. All perfectly timed to feed my children, so we barely had to buy any other food. It was like being wrapped in a beautiful little cocoon. My son R would badger me every day to go down for afternoon tea and then pile his plates high with tiny tea cakes and slices of apple pie. And the juice dispenser – orange juice, watermelon juice, whatever kind of juice. At one point we thought we might’ve been giving the kids alcoholic punch by mistake but luckily that did not turn out to be the case. We also ventured out into the intense heat of Kuching for riverside walks, to look at all the historic buildings, and the Borneo Cultures Museum which had amazing displays of village life over the decades and the traditional longhouses.
I often find holidays to be the perfect environment to see the differences between how you currently live your life at home with your familiar ways and comforts, and how you could do things differently. Obviously, having all our meals cooked and only having a few items of clothing each made our lives much easier. But it got me thinking about all the extraneous stuff we have in our homes – hundreds of items of clothing, when we might only need twenty. Two dinner sets, multiple serving platters, fifteen mugs… when all you need is four, even two, of everything and you just wash it if you need it. I have felt inspired to pack away clothing and create capsule wardrobes for everyone (if you can call kids’ sweatpants and t-shirts part of a capsule wardrobe). I would also really, really like someone to follow me around, pick things up after my children, and cook for everyone. That would be amazing, but not something we can bring back to our middle-class lives.
Holidays are also a time when you can form new habits. Most of the time O & R do not sit down when they eat and roam around the room, or sit at their child-sized table, or on the couch. To avoid getting crumbs everywhere, they had to get used to sitting at a dining table on holiday, and I have tried to keep up this habit at home. I’ve also tried to phase out a bedtime cracker habit, as they didn’t have access to those crackers on holiday and seem to have forgotten about them. On the other side, I lost my motivation to write every day. I had all these intentions to do creative writing in the evenings, but I was either too tired or content with doing other things. I went to a hotel gym once, so now we are back in NZ, I’ve had to force myself to go.
I’ll leave you with a photo of some beautiful orangutans we saw in a sanctuary outside Kuching. I previously wrote about the blight of palm trees all through Malaysia – the native jungles are stunning, and so was this experience.
