Flight to Sri Lanka (Malindo Air Kuala Lumpur to Colombo)

Kuala Lumpur airport remained quiet at night. I didn’t have Priority Pass at that time, but found one restaurant open to my surprise. Thus I got to try nasi lemak (coconut fragrant rice), the signature Malay dish, right before I left the country. I didn’t have appetite to take more nyonya cakes though.

After the meal I found myself at the wrong terminal, so quickly took the tram to the other one. It’s still early for my 9am flight anyway. Now I still enjoy taking red-eye flights and overnight buses/trains during travel, but certainly not as much as when I was 22. I didn’t even feel tired at all during this flight, despite the strenuous Malacca day trip on the previous day.

I didn’t even remember where I spent the rest of the night (maybe I just walked around the terminal). It was when I finally checked in that I encountered some problems: the ground staff demanded to see my Sri Lanka eVisa printed, which I just received via email the day before. No matter how hard I tried to show her the eVisa screenshot on my phone, she insisted to only take a paper copy. Fortunately, I was able to have it printed eventually by another reluctant ground staff. I really didn’t understand the reason behind this. Did they suspect the email could be fake? Anyway, remember to print all visas ahead of time in the future (although it could be a pain on a longer trip like this)

More airport touring after I got my boarding pass. “Why Sri Lanka?” you may ask. The thing is, I am fascinated by the history, culture and languages from virtually every single country in the world. Except for active war zones and genocidal rogue states (eg North Korea, Russia after 2022), there isn’t any country that I don’t want to visit at the moment. Now I’ve set a clear goal to visit all 197 countries in the world.

Thus my answer would be: Why not?

Practically, there was in fact a reason why I chose Sri Lanka specifically this time. Flights to Israel/Jordan from East Asia (event those with transits) were much more expensive than one from Malaysia to India/Sri Lanka, and one from India/Sri Lanka to Israel/Jordan combined. This was mainly because low-cost carriers like Air Asia and Malindo offered very good deal to fly from KUL to South Asia. My flight today, for example, cost less than $100.

I am a big fan of breaking a journey from point A to point B into multiple bookings, which allows me to add extra excursions to my travel and briefly experience the countries that I otherwise don’t have a chance to. In fact I haven’t ever flied directly from SFO (my base) to TPE (home) at all! On this leg I had 3 options as breaking points: Colombo, Chennai and Kochi, and chose to come to Sri Lanka rather arbitrarily. It would be a shame if I landed on the subcontinent only for a few hours without even leaving the airport, so I made this a 4 day extended stopover.

(the PU track – must have been inspired by Tokyo Narita)

There’s another X-ray check right at the gate at KUL. Before boarding the ground staffs handed out the Sri Lankan arrival card.

Malindo Air B737–800. Malindo air (now rebranded as “Batik Air Malaysia”) is associated with the Lion Air in Indonesia, which one could tell by the similarity of their logos.

I was quite impressed that as an LCC, Malindo even served a free hot meal on such a short flight. This is unheard of on low-cost carriers — normally they don’t serve free meals even on transatlantic or transpacific flights.

It wasn’t long until we arrived at Colombo, Sri Lanka. Numerous SriLankan Airline aircrafts around.

First time setting foot on the subcontinent. The president’s picture could be seen right at the arrival (not a norm in modern countries I assume. Imagine seeing Trump at JFK).

Out of nowhere I started to wonder if I were denied entry, would I just be staying at the transit zone for 3 days until my outbound flight? At the end the entry process was quite smooth. They gave me a rather low quality piece of brownish paper to fill in my infos and staple my photo. The entry stamp was put on the paper as well (unfortunately not on my passport due to Taiwan’s international status. Some countries put stamps on our passports, while others put stamps on a separate piece of paper. Georgia is the only country that doesn’t recognize our passport and denies our entry completely)

Quickly exchanged money (I got to say, Sri Lankan rupees look fabulous) and purchased a local sim card.

Before I left the airport, I grabbed myself a fish bun and whatever other bread at the food court, and started to research how to catch a chicken bus to Kandy. The city in central Sri Lanka, the religious center that housed the relic of Buddha’s tooth, and the capital of the last Sinhalese kingdom.

Sri Lanka has experienced a series of hardship since my visit, including the horrendous terrorist attack in 2019 and the devastating economical crisis recently. A month ago its economy utterly collapsed, which led to hospital closures due to a shortage in medical supplies, among other horrible crises. Thinking about the short yet exhilarating adventures I had in this country, I sincerely wish the craziness in Sri Lanka and the rest of the world ends soon.