Too much freedom

[Aaron Christian]

After i finished high school, in 2002, a high school friend, named Dragan, and i decided to defer uni, save up and go overseas for a while. We both worked hard, labouring for about eight months and saved. As neither of us were very good with money, and the fact that we both really liked to party, we fell well short of our savings target and could not afford a trip to Europe as we had planned. After jumping online, and looking around for cheaper options, we decided to do a tour of Asia. Neither of us wanted to do a set tour on a bus or anything, and we decided that we wanted to see more than just Bali, so we planned to fly to Kuala Lumpur, where I have some family and stay with them for a couple of weeks, then use it as a base, to travel around to Singapore, Thailand and finally end up in Bali.

September came and we were ready to go, money in the bank, plane tickets purchased and my aunty was going to pick us up from the airport in KL. When we landed we hit our first snag of the journey, the size of the airport in KL. I had been there before, but with my parents, and navigating the huge complex with just Dragan was a bit of a challenge. But after we found our way to the sky train that takes us to the second terminal, and we managed to find our way to where my aunty was going to pick us up. Tis little adventure would prove to be tiny in comparison with what we were going to go through during the rest of our trip.

Once we got settled in at my grandma’s place, we decided to head straight into KL and see some sights, and just generally enjoy our first overseas holiday without our families. Taxis were reasonably cheap, and we managed to get around using the MRT system, which is their version of our Met system in Melbourne, although theirs is a lot better than ours. We ate the local food checked out the local malls, and went for a walk down Petaling Street, which is a market filled with imitation clothing labels, watches, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

That night, we didn’t waste any time checking out the nightlife. My aunties are relatively young and still enjoy the night scene, and they took us out to a few bars, after which Dragan and I decided to hit some clubs, and assured them that we would be able to find our own way home when we wanted to come home. The two of us felt like we could do anything, when I look back on it, it seems like we were high on the freedom we had. We ended up in a popular club called Zook, were some big name European DJs were headlining the night. That is about the point when the night goes blurry, but it is sufficed to say that we did not find our home. Instead I woke up on the floor of a room. I quickly realised that I was in a hotel room. An expensive hotel room! As I got up and looked around and saw people lounged out in the room, some on the bed, others on the couch and floor. That’s when I started to worry. I vaguely recognised some of them from last night, but who were the others and what was I doing in a room with them? I tried to recall my night, but only had little flashes and did not know how I got here. Dragan was lying on the bed, so I woke him up and we went out onto the balcony for a cigarette. He told me what happened that night, and things started to come back to me a little bit. After we had a chat on the balcony I realised what we had done. We had met these people last night, at Zook. All of them were locals, and we had told them, in our drunken stupor, that we were famous DJs from Australia, so as to try and impress the girls. Because we are amateur DJs, we knew enough lingo and stuff to convince them that we were in Malaysia investigating the prospect of doing a tour here next year. As we got drunker and drunker, we got deeper and deeper into the lie, and Drags said that was about the time when I became a little too intoxicated to help him sell the lie anymore.

The girls got a couple of guy friends they knew, and we all headed off to a recovery club. Dragan had told me that by this point I was totally incapable of making any decisions, or even holding a decent conversation, and he didn’t know how to get us home at all. So we followed them into the recovery club, and we continued to party until I sat down in the corner and passed out.

When recovery started to close Dragan found himself in some real trouble, because we had to go home, and he didn’t know where home was. To add to his problems, the locals we had been partying with all night wanted to come back to our place. Dragan wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind to make great decisions at that point either, but he knew he wanted the girls to come back with us, so he said we were staying in the Grand Plaza Park Royal Hotel, because we had seen that hotel on the net, and knew it was classy. He told them to meet us there a little later on, as we wanted to go back first and freshen up. He woke me up threw me in a cab, and off we went, to a 900RM (about $480AUD) a night room. Check in was only at 2:00, but Dragan managed to get a room that was ready already, as it was only about 12:30. About an hour latter the girls turned up, with quite a few uninvited friends. Apparently I was dead to the world by this time, and everyone else was pretty tired too, so it wasn’t much of a party that I missed out on, more like everyone sitting around chatting, but Dragan had to keep up his fake persona for the rest of the day. Everyone ended up crashing in the room with us, and Dragan got real cosy with one of the girls, Anna. We ended up having to keep the room for 2 days, as we spent them with the girls, pretending to live our rockstar lives. Needless to say, I had to call my grandma and let her know that we were alright, but my aunties sure did get a kick out of the situation we had got ourselves into. But this was only the first weekend of our Asian adventure. And we had gone too hard too fast. Less then a week in and we had blown over half our money. But that’s when the trip really got interesting. The next post will be about our bus trip from KL to Bangkok, and us racking up huge debt on our credit cards in the pursuit of more fun. A mistake we are both still paying for today.