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Well we have completed our trip of asia and are safely back in Winnipeg. Sharon is driving me out to Langenburg tomorrow morning, so I'll give a rundown of what's happened since I left off.

On April 15 we started our surf camp, we booked a 4 day from Tuesday to Friday and met up with a group that had gone M-F for $100 more. Started the day with a 3 hour bus ride up the coast, then we donned wetsuits had a bite to eat and went for our first lesson. After two hours we started getting rained on and went back to camp for supper. After supper it got messy, there was a lot of cheap pints and even cheaper (and grosser) sangria, from what i recall... met quite a few people, a Canadian, about 6 Brits and a couple Irish. Par for Australia. The rest of the surf camp was pretty much the same routine, although we travelled the whole way from Sydney to Byron Bay over the four days checking out different surf spots every day. Unfortunately it kept raining on us (it rained every single day in NSW) but it was never torrential. Friday we did a surf comp then got to Byron at nightfall, had a hostel issue but it got sorted . That night we went out to Cheeky Monkeys and got right smashed again as a send off from the crew.

The rest of that week was quite boring actually, we didn't do much - biked up to the lighthouse, rented a board for a day, chilled with the irish, laid on the beach, went and viewed semi-pro. Saw some crazy Funky jazz-Fused ambient music by a Columbian band, that was sweet. Spent as little as possible, wired all of our cash home, saw the Wings beat the Avs in Game 1 and then boarded our $150 flight from the gold coash (coolangatta) to kuala lumpur..

(copied and pasted)

So we fly into Kuala Lumpur around 330 on April 26 , whose airport is 65 km SOUTH of the actual city for some reason. We're flying low cost carrier so we land at the KLCC not the KLIA, which is about 20 mins away.

Anyway, I get off the plane and go to the atm to get some Ringgit (about 3 Ringgit = $1). Put in my pin once, doesn't accept. Put in my pin twice, machine eats my visa card. fuck. I was even thinking, if this machine doesn't take my pin this time then screw it as I don't want to lose my card. But it ate it after TWO incorrect pins, unbelievable.

I call up the "cust service" and of course I'm in asia so it is extremely broken english. I'm also operating on my Australian SIM card as I'd just arrived,and I have no money or CREDIT CARD to use the pay phones. $6 credit total @ $.80 per minute to try to figure this out. So I manage to explain the situation and they sent a guy to get my card out of the machine, however I had to meet him at the KLIA at a main bank depot and thankfully got the card back.

If that had happened today (Sunday) I'd have been screwed as the bank ould have been closed. We leave this morning to 'nam and i couldn't exactly resched our flights on account of a missing card, but seeing as I lost my debit in Thailand I would have had no way of accessing funds for the duration of the trip. Whew.

Then i call visa to look into this pin issue and the dude tells me that many asian atm's have issues with pins >4 digits. On top of that, visa has nothing to do with the pin, it has to do with my "local branch" so I have to call them during normal business hours - considering they're about 14 hours behind, i have to wait a few days to even try to sort the issue. thank god for wifi gizmo voip on my nokia phone @ $.02 per minute to any country.

tbc..