NZ travelogue: Flying out

Our flight from the low-cost carrier terminal at the Kuala Lumpur international airport was routinely boring, like all flights ultimately turned out to be. As you can see from the picture below, all the other passengers looked equally bored. And this was just at the start of the flight! We departed from the terminal at about 8.40am, right on time.

With no dancing girls in the aisles throughout the 10-hour journey, the only entertainment we had were the movies on my netbook. It was our life-saver. On our last few holidays, I had taken along four or five memory cards for the cameras. Not this time. I decided that whatever photos we had taken for the day should be copied to the netbook and thereby freeing the camera's memory cards for the next day's digital workout. And since the netbook would be with us, I might as well include some movies for us to enjoy during the long flights.

The food was also routinely boring. For the flight to Christchurch, I had purchased the in-flight meals together with the tickets. On board the aircraft, I took a sneak at the menu and saw that there were actually a choice of two meals. Nevertheless, the cabin crew told us that only the chcken lasagna was available. Ah, well, never mind, if we had to stick to this meal, so be it.

The lasagna did not look very appealing when we peeled back the aluminium foil but to our delight, it was actually quite tasty.

Maybe the only real advice I can give to anyone flying with AirAsia X is that if you want ample leg room to stretch yourself comfortably, you should consider paying extra for the hot seats. They are really value for money.

The only concern about the hot seats is that you may suddenly find other people prostrating themselves in front of you. No, they weren't asking for our seats. But yes, they had other motives. We had about five or six people who did just that, the prostrating, in front of us. But they were quite nice about it and had asked for permission from us. If you can cope with that momentary distraction, the rest of the flight should be rather uneventful. We encountered this only during the out-bound flight, though.