Day 274 (March 22): Sunday Was a Roller Coaster

Sunday started like any other day under a Restricted Movement Order in a barely-familiar foreign country. There was breakfast and screen time and generally low expectations. Then we heard about Peru.

The news reported that Americans (and others) in Peru were effectively stranded. There were no commercial flights available for them to depart and due to “optics,” according to the stories, the US government did not want to send in a military plane to evacuate them. Then we heard about Singapore.

Several sources informed us that Singapore had revised its COVID measures and would prohibit even transiting (connecting) between flights for foreigners. Our main exit strategy had been eliminated.

We had decided on Friday (March 20) that we would give ourselves a break for deliberating on our plans until Monday (March 23) but here we were on Sunday back at it. It's eerie to read the posts from Friday and Saturday in light of what's transpired since. What if Malaysia extends the RMO beyond the initial two weeks (likely)? What if we’re “stranded” here for one, two or three months? What if it becomes six?

I’ll save the substance of the deliberations for a different post because I want to use this installment to document the haywire day that followed.

We started looking at our options. We had been thinking a little about going to Japan. There are lots of flights to Tokyo from Kuala Lumpor (and everywhere else). Japan, like Singapore and Hong Kong, has an excellent record in terms of the rate of new cases. But there’s a cloud hanging over their numbers because of their efforts to keep the Olympics.

I turned to a travel guru I know and he helped us identify our main options: fly through Tokyo, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. We could fly through Singapore until the end of Monday (the new rules would take effect at 23:59 3/23). We could fly from the regional airport closest to us, Johor Bahru, up to KL but the frequency is low and connections lousy.

By the end of the afternoon we picked an itinerary: I bought a flight from KL to Taiwan (TPE) and on to Seattle. We would fly out on Thursday afternoon and be home on Friday evening. During dinner we shared the news with the kids. We explained that we’d spend Monday and Tuesday packing in an unhurried way and shared that we’d be flying first class across the ocean to compensate ourselves. Heck, the fares are so low as the airlines dump inventory that it was hard to resist.


After dinner I booked a flight (for Wednesday evening) from Johor to KL; I researched and reserved rooms in a hotel near the airport. I booked a rental car to get us from Seattle to Portland. We got the kids ready for bed and did our regular routine. It wasn’t even 8:00, which is early by our standards. Then I found out about Taiwan.


In the two hours or so since I had booked our tickets, Taipei/Taiwan announced that it would cease transit connections effective March 24. Our flights (KUL-TPE-SEA) were cancelled. It was Sunday at 8pm.

Simultaneously, our announcement to the other worldschooling families in our complex prompted a reply from a Candian family who, like us, had declared a solid intention to wait this out. LIke us, they felt that it was safer to weather the storm in Malaysia than to return to North America. But, like us, the day’s news had pushed them across some invisible line and now they, too, were going home.

Four adults, three laptops and at least four phones were huddled around our kitchen table (in violation of social distancing orders, I’ll acknowledge, but we had all been effectively quarantined for about a week already). They were finding flights on search engines that we could easily confirm had been cancelled. It’s weird to feel like a near-professional travel planner, having booked dozen of complicated international flights in the last six months, and now having none of the usual tools at your disposal when you need them most.

Our friends were trying to reach Vancouver. Expedia had shown them an itinerary through Tokyo but further searching revealed that it was gone. To our shock, they had reached the conclusion to leave late on Sunday afternoon and were preparing to leave on Monday. Surely that wasn’t possible, we said.

But the shock of Singapore and then Taipei shutting down, each with barely 24 hours notice, put a fright into us. We checked non-Asian hubs: Dubai (Emirates) seemed to prohibit transit connections but the wording was abiguous. Maybe it would work. There was an itinerary - expensive a long - that would take us from KL to Dubai and then into JFK. There was another one with a flight from Dubai to Seattle! (A few hours later, Dubai announced that it had elimiated transit trips with less than 24 hours notice.)

We liked the idea of traveling with our friends. But could we mobilize that fast? To be on a flight Monday out of KL meant packing overnight and driving to KL in the morning. The daily flight from JBH to KUL would arrive in time to make the connection. The other flights to the regional airport in KL would require a 45 minute drive but we weren’t sure that would be allowed under the Restricted Movement Order. The only alternative would be to drive ourselves, a probable violation of the RMO. At least our friends are retired cops!

Initially, I booked the KUL-HKG leg of the flight so that we could be sure to sit with our friends. It was only about $150 per person! Then I went to book KUL-SFO-PDX and found that the tickets (remember, I wanted to fly first class for this leg) were almost $8000 per person, a clear non-starter. Even the coach fare was $1500 per person. Our friends had booked KUL-HKG-YVR for less than $100 per person.

I did everything I could think of. I used our VPN, an incognito window and a differerent browser but any itinerary to PDX was outrageously expensive. Even just a ticket from HKG to SFO was bonkers expensive. So I tried from the beginning: a one-way from KUL-HKG-SFO was only $650 coach so that was the trick. I bought the trans-pacific flights and then SFO-PDX separately. We would be on a flight out of KL in about 18 hours!

Elise started packing. I bought the tickets from SFO-PDX and figured out where to spend the night in San Francisco, all the whie considering the possibility that COVID rules might prohibit us from leaving the airport. We’d be landing at about 10pm and there was a 6am departure. Should we just sleep (probably on the floor) in the airport?

The next problem was getting to KL. Our rental car was not booked as a one-way; could I return it in KL and just pay a fee? I couldn’t find a phone number for Europcar that would answer, even in parts of the world that were nominally open.

Also, the highways in Malaysia have tolls and the car rental agent said that if we drove on them we’d need to pick up an RFID toll tag at a gas station or convenience store. But would those be open amidst all the shut downs? Were they essential businesses? The toll company website said all their centers were shut down. Google said the highway drive would take 3 hours and the toll-free drive would take 5.

Then there’s the RMO. It’s explicitly illegal to make nonessential trips and specifically interstate trips and this would be both, in terms of the trip purposes that the RMO considers “essential.” Would there be checkpoints? Would there be patrols? At least our friends are retired cops and they had told us stories of using the badge he still carries during other police encounters (he’s been stopped for what a critic might call, “traveling while brown.”)

As the hours passed and Sunday night became Monday morning, our bags were getting full. We were making piles of stuff we had collected for surviving the quarantine, some just a few hours earlier. In the course of the day, we had gone from being comfortable with living in an apartment in Malaysia for a month or two to leaving the country the next day. I could never have forseen that. We had to suppress the emotions, which included sadness and anger very close to the surface. I broke down several times under the frustration of buying tickets and worrying about the driving. My mother, who was now awake in California, was given the task of researching the toll system!

By about 3am we had done as much packing as we could. We set an alarm for 7am so that we could shower, finish packing and be ready to start calling Europcar’s local numbers when they started to open. We would have to be on the road absolutely no later than 11 to drive 3+ hours and get to our 5:50 flight without stress and with enough time to handle any problems (like roadblocks, customs, etc.)

I slept for 3 or 3.5 hours but Elise just tossed and turned, at best. At 7am, nobody answered at the car rental agency and the outgoing message wasn’t in English. We woke the kids and explained why their rooms were empty and the bags were packed. Remember, when they went to bed 12 hours earlier, they thought we had 3 days until we left!

I finally reached the car company and found out that we’d be able to return the car in KL for a fee. The agent told me the drive was against the law. I started packing the car. I had rented a size larger than had planned and then they had upgraded me. Still, our bags barely fit. Henry was in a third row seat with suitcases literally stuffed to the celing. Even so, we left one of the kid’s suitcases behind to save space; we abandoned about half of our curriculum, which created enough room to cut one bag. It wouldn’t have fit except on somebody’s lap.

The rest of the story belongs to another post. Our March 23rd lasted about 36 hours so there's a lot to tell.

I want to say, in the context of “it takes a village” that the role of our friends was invaluable. Corey, the travel guru, was like this magical source of experise and insight. At one point I thought about Joan Cusack’s character in Grosse Point Blank, managing logistics for the character played by John Cusack. Or some combination of M and Q from a Bond movie. I don’t know what else Corey was doing on a Sunday afternoon but he did a lot more than I expected or deserved.

Chuck and Tine (“Tina”), our Canadian worldschooling buddies, played this unpredictable role. They’d probably say that they had only a kernal of doubt about staying until we announced we were leaving and then the dam broke wide open. It wasn’t easy to deal with ticket logistics in the company of new friends (see any mention I’ve made of my anxiety, stress or temper over the last few months and then multiply it by ten to estimate my state of mind during these hours); at some point I asked Tine to go because I couldn’t experience that anguish and panic with a non-relative in the room.

If they hadn’t come over, though, I wouldn’t have accepted the need to leave so quickly. Having lost our Taipei itinerary, I would have booked flights through Tokyo, also later in the week. Perhaps those days will pass and Narita won’t close. Perhaps it still would have been possible to get to KL. But we bought into their certainty about leaving fast just as they bought into ours about leaving at all. Being together - driving in convoy, navigating security, sharing a meal, sharing a wait, sharing a transfer - made a huge difference. It also helped the kids, who were happily distracted by the presence of peers and probably pressed into marginally better behavior by the presence of another family.

We’re also grateful to another family back in JB. Brodi took care of our apartment and our stuff just as we had done for another family that left abruptly a week earlier. Brodi arranged for a swap-meet to distribute our hand me downs to the other remaining families. I’m glad we didn’t have to dump our stuff in the trash, which would have been a waste. And I’m grateful that we didn’t have to figure out how to check out and return our keys amidst all the other stress, especially because the rental office is closed as a nonessential business!

Eventually, this will be another crazy story from this crazy chapter in our lives. Eventually, I think I’ll look at this a crucible in which our shared character was forged. But I really hope I don’t every have to go through anything like that again for a long, long time.

Nearing midnight (Sunday), we were making progress on our packing.

The license plate caused me to think of this as Vodkamobile. Look closely: not a cubic inch to spare.