Day +455 : Prepare for year end holiday

I am fine today.

My family and I will be going back to our hometown Bintangor for a long holiday from 4th to 23rd December. A government staff from East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) who works in West Malaysia is entitled for free air ticket for the entire family members once every two years. I am very fortunate to have my wife as government staff :-)

We used the free air ticket facility provided by the government on November 2005 whereby the end of the trip marked the beginning of my fight against Leukaemia. Time passes swiftly; it had been almost two years since then, and I really appreciate and thank God that I am still fine and able to plan for the next trip :-)

In 2005, the government only provided air ticket to Kuching. As it is quite inconvenience to transit in Kuching airport with so many children, we requested to have a flight direct to Sibu and we would top up the balance, but unfortunately, our request was not considered.

When I started to plan for our year end trip a few weeks ago, I asked my wife to contact the relevant department to make the same request again – to have direct flight to Sibu rather than Kuching. To our surprise, the response was beyond our expectation this time; we are not only able to do this but the government will also bear the full air fare between Kuala Lumpur and Sibu :-)

I couldn’t believe this initially and we only knew the reason behind after my wife called the staff in charge second time. Finally, we found out that the government has relaxed the “pekeliling (regulation)” to allow staff to fly to their hometown starting from 2006. But no one ever inform my wife about the changes.

Fortunately, we take the initiative to call the person in charge of this free travel; else we will still book the flight to Kuching and transit to Sibu on our own expenses. The total cost of air fare for six of us is about RM4,000 :-)

See you next post :-)