Today saw us load up the car and drive to Songkhla, admittedly one day later than planned all thanks to problems with tax returns and Trixie being tired out. Thereby hang other tales. Anyway we have arrived.
However on the way we managed to dodge all the customary Malaysian Motorway Madness, avoiding the middle lane dither arsers, weaving twits and tail-gating hoodlums. About 80km shy of the border we decided that it was high time that we stopped for drinks and lunch and,people will be pleased to know that my Teh tarik was up to its usual standards. As I set about tackling the last mouthful a uniformed lady approached, looking a little nervous, along with a female security guard, also looking a little nervous too. This didn't spark anxiety for any of us as generally speaking most security guards are largely decorative in function and the uniformed officer was in a quasi police outfit, not the real thing. It transpired that she wished to invite the children to take part in a colouring competition that JPJ, the vehicle licensing, ownership and paperwork department of the Malaysian Government were hosting. So, with little intention, of taking part, we agreed to go, after finishing our drinks.
A quick loo stop and we were approaching our parked car when the JPJ lady in question saw us, beamed, and welcomed us all as if we were long lost relatives. Colouring had to happen now. As well as the JPJ colouring session there were several related stalls, some of which offered free cake and oranges (Chinese New Year) while others put lots of effort into great displays announcing the importance of road safety. Crowds of JPJ officers and police looked on while various children coloured and alarmingly close by cars drive around looking for parking spaces, carefully ignoring people who were trying to cross the road to either participate or avoid colouring. Various other JPJ officers commended our lot on their colouring while yet more cars drove past with many vehicles having unsecured children on the back or front seat.
Moments later, for some reason not immediately apparent a helicopter landed in a service area opposite where we either colouring or being photographed by, by now, almost every JPJ officer in the region. Drivers on the main carriage ways rushed on pausing only to turn their heads and look at the helicopter mere metres away from the road. Moments later the helicopter departed, thankfully without causing a pile up, and the noise of its engine was replaced by a far sweeter sound: that of Lexi being interviewed over a public address system by yet another JPJ officer asking for her views on Malaysian food and other matters with no connection to the business of JPJ.
After more photo taking and handshakes all round we departed. Apparently the children were not permitted to take their artwork with them but were encouraged to keep the colouring pencils. Probably a fair swap. At no time did it occur to anyone that there might be more direct action approaches to help improve road safety rather than having a massively over-staffed colouring stall, but hey, what the heck?
The Thai border was slightly less organised than the colouring stall. It had clearly undergone a streaming-lining system initiated by The Vogons and so it consequently took an age to get through. First challenge was filling in the forms and the most tricky part of that process was finding the right forms. Every non Thai entering or leaving the Kingdom must fill one in however they were nowhere obvious to be found. Having looked in all the obvious places such as on the desks near to the passport control booths I gave up and went into an office. It was full of uniformed officials all trying to work as slowly as possible plus one bloke in a casual shirt and leather jacket watching boxing on TV. For some reason this bloke was also guarding a small stack of the vital forms. After a bit of coaxing I managed to discover that as well as watching boxing on TV he was also an official and so he was able to hand out forms which, grudgingly, he did. He also gave us two forms to fill in to allow us to bring the car in with us.
We joined a queue got to the front and were promptly told that it was the wrong queue, tried to drive the car through anyway but were told that we had to then go back to a different queue instead and then waited 20 minutes in a queue for a surly character to stamp, date and deface our documentation without uttering a word.
Nowhere were there any instructions as to what we had to do. All of it was a mixture of experience and guess work. I know that I lead off about how slow parts of Malaysian Government is but the Thai border folk made Malaysia look like efficient professionals running a slick operation.