SEPT 12 — Question: When is it preferable to walk home from KLIA than to take a cab? Answer: When it’s a Friday afternoon or evening. 

But I’m running ahead of myself.

Departure

I was coming back from some exotic place. I think it was Edinburgh or Helsinki or maybe Kuching. The budget airline I took (okay it was probably Kuching) was implementing its "Never Be On Time" policy again. 

We meant to leave Kuching at 2.15pm, at 2pm the metal wormhole through which passengers walk out from the gate to the plane led to… no plane. Sometime between 2.30pm and forever, the plane arrived and we all got in. 

My seat was 32C, I sat down, ordered some champagne and got ready to fly – only to be told by the stewardess that I had to pack the heck up and move to seat 16F i.e. the seat next to the side-exit door.

Yippee. This seat must be totally designed to replace the Chinese water torture. The seat is missing an arm-rest, its reclining function is disabled and the monitor is a good ten metres away from your face. You look like a hunchbacked guy who’s spastic in one-arm, poking away at screen buttons which refuse to budge because they’re laughing at your miserable life.

As for leg-space? Might as well let a steam-roller crush my bloodless legs; it’ll be a less painful death.

Well, anyway, so off we go and – this has to be a Guinness World Record – the stewardess does not register the fact that I’m not wearing my seat belt. Why didn’t I wear my seat-belt? Because if we crash I want to make the accident authorities work harder to identify my body.

Or maybe the stewardess did see me but decided it wasn’t important because her shitty job doesn’t pay enough. She definitely didn’t look as delighted as her colleagues speaking in the Safety Video. Those two were super-charming and looked like they were born to fly. 

So we take off and within a few minutes we’re served the meal of the day which, absolutely, must sit alongside the word "pathetic" in the Oxford Advanced Frequent Flyers Dictionary. If what Malaysia Airlines serves on local flights can be described as "Mixed Rice Wearing a Tuxedo", the stuff this airline gives passengers can only be characterised as "Something Smashed n’ Grabbed From a Cheap Bakery."

Arrival

So we finally land. Some passengers must be total OCD patients because I’m sure the plane hadn’t fully stopped before they were already out of their seats and opening the overhead compartments. Whenever I see this I always tell myself, wow, I’m in the presence of localized James Bonds who must’ve been told there’s a bomb on board the plane and it’s their job to"Make sure the package doesn’t tip at the exact moment the pilot hits the brakes! It’s all up to you, James!”

Now comes the best part.

I walk the 10 miles from the gate to the walk-slower-lators, past the chocolate shops, past Victoria’s Secret, past the baggage carousels which (as everyone knows) should’ve come with built-in hotel rooms in case you need to wait till next week for the bags to emerge, and on to the Airport Taxi Counters.

Where, lo and behold, I’m told that there are no more taxis.

Well, where have they all gone? Oh, they’re all in KL and now it’s Friday evening which means they’re going to be stuck until Christmas. You are welcome to wait, Sir, but it’s going to be a while. Probably more than an hour.

What’s the deal with there being so few KLIA taxis? Why couldn’t, say, "normal" taxis go to the airport to pick up passengers? Well, guess what. I was chatting with my regular taxi guy and I asked him the same question: Why, after you drop me off at Departures, can’t you just hang around the pick up the passengers at Arrival?

He told me he doesn’t do that for two reasons. One, the airport taxis have lost almost 50 per cent of their business to Uber, a situation so desperate that they’ve clamped down on any other non-airport cab taking away their business. Two, even in the past when there were fewer restrictions on cabs picking up folks, my driver sometimes waited up to six hours to get a fare. In that time, with some luck, he could make RM200-300 in the city.

And you thought your job sucked, didn’t you?

So, back to me at the Airport Taxi Counter, and let’s do the Math, shall we?

I wait in Airport No Man’s Land for an hour until the taxis come back to the airport. After which I must wait another hour to actually get into the cab on account of the two million passengers waiting along with me. Assuming the taxi isn’t blocked by a horde of angry folks who’ve been transformed into taxi-invading zombies, I’ll be stuck in traffic for the better part of two to three hours on the highway.

So adding up the hours: 1 + 1 + 2 (or 3)? That’s about 20 hours from the time I roll my trolley out of the carousel until the time I open my front door. Wouldn’t it be better to walk home instead?

(I live in Ara Damansara, by the way, which is Polish for "Near To The Old Airport." KLIA to Ara Damansara usually takes about 45 minutes of driving but today it looked like I could be travelling 45 light-years.)

Eventually I took the KLIA Express back home. Other than the fact that the train was packed tighter than 10 whales in a sardine can, plus the fact that KL Sentral felt like a mutated pasar malam where the signboards threatened to devour you, plus the fact that the LRT ticketing machines stretched to Bangkok and back, plus the fact that I was clutching four pieces of luggage and sweating like a steamed fish – it wasn’t a bad experience.

So here’s one evening-saving tip from yours truly: Cancel all your flights into KLIA on a Friday afternoon. Land either before lunch or after supper. In the event you can’t retime your flight, get onto the plane, knock on the cockpit door and persuade the pilot to punch in the coordinates for Melbourne instead. 

Sure it’s a longer flight. But you’ll get a cab from the airport without waiting for water to emerge on Mars. And all you gotta do is endure a few more hours inside a metal tube 30,000 feet in the air with hundreds of people with varying degrees of mental health – what can possibly go wrong?

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.