Travel can be seriously funny, or not

What would a holiday be without funny stories to entertain your friends with when you’re back home? Most of us have a couple of humourous tales that will illicit anything from a giggle to stomach-churning guffaws. These generally begin with, ‘You wouldn’t believe what happened to me…’

My story unfolded in Kuala Lumpur, 9 years ago, while my husband and I were travelling from Bali. We had a one day layover in Malaysia and thought it would be a great idea to add one more country to our list of places we’d been to.

This spurred on a last minute tour from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport into the city to check out the architecturally magnificent Petronas Towers. With just enough money leftover from our island holiday to make it to and from the airport, and a light lunch – we weren’t going to deviate from the plan.

Kuala Lumpur is a first class city, a speed train transports you from the airport to the towers at lightning speed. As we ran towards the closing train doors my sandal got caught. We made it through in the nick of time, but my sandal didn’t – and to my horror the doors snapped closed.

I was standing in the train, barefoot and horrified, with no money to rectify the problem – and our luggage in transit. Once the maniacal laughter between my husband and I died down, and the curious glares stopped, I realised I was barefoot in a foreign country. It doesn’t help that I am a germaphobe.

If you’ve been to the mall at the Petronas Towers, you would know it is not polite to walk around barefoot. So the toss up was between lunch or footware, but there was no budget for Jimmy Choo or Louis Vuitton.

After two hours of walking around, and being stared at for being shoeless, we found a reasonably priced store and attempted to use a credit card, which we weren’t sure had any money left in it or not. I watched my husband from afar with baited breath. And then I got the thumbs up, and my feet did a happy dance.

Lunch was delicious too. And the part of this story I enjoy retelling is how completely clean my feet were after walking around for all that time, Malaysians take pride in keeping their city spotless.