Tortway Lagoon, Kuala Lumpur

[zonewombat]

A new officer and his wife recently arrived at post here.  We knew them in what seems like another lifetime, when we all served together in Malaysia.  Some memories stand out, like the time we all co-hosted a Halloween party at their house, and sometime around midnight the guy thought it would be a good plan to go off with some of the other guests.  He was maybe a bit drunk, but thought he could get a taxi back.  He failed to take into account the fact that he was dressed as a Greek God, in a tiny white miniskirted toga, with gold leaves on his head and gold curly ribbon wrapped around his bare feet to indicate sandals.  Oddly, no taxi driver in this very Muslim country was inclined to pick up a big Orang Buti in a miniskirt in the wee hours.  So he walked back the couple miles barefoot.  At least it wasn't cold.

(names have been changed)

It was Carl's 30th birthday, and he wanted to go to the waterpark.  He and his wife Leigh, Allen and Jenny, and R and myself were sort of the group, so we all decided to go. The new park was called Sunway Lagoon, and featured a small amusement park with a roller coaster, flume ride, and white-water rafting ride along with the wave pool, water slides, and standard waterpark stuff.  We visited it about a week after it opened.

We hit the amusement park first thing, and Carl wanted to start with the white-water ride.  This consisted of round rafts made of formed hard plastic - everyone sat around the edge and faced the middle.  There was a table-looking thing in the middle that we learned later was supposed to support a bar to hold onto.  Some of the other rafts might've had them; ours had nothing to secure us in.

First event on the ride was a drop of about 18".  The raft went off that drop and everyone on the trailing edge was flung forward into the central pillar.  Jenny and Leigh went sprawling onto the floor of the raft; Carl, in the center, hit the edge of the pillar with his face, broke a tooth, and starting bleeding from lips and nose.  No way off the ride at this point. 

The rest of the ride was less exciting.  Extremely less exciting.  The raft meandered along a cement canal, with occasional overhead spigots pouring water on us.  They weren't even decorated; just 1" pipes sticking out of the wall.  Finally we got to the end, and with Carl holding his wet shirt to his face, asked the workers where to find First Aid.  They had no clue, and sent us to the information kiosk. 

The info desk was unmanned, but we found a janitor by a nearby soda machine, and he used his radio to find someone to unlock the nurse's station.  They hadn't hired a nurse yet, but were willing to provide ice packs, aspirin, and bandages.  We indicated we were willing to throw in the towel, but Carl remained resolute: we'd paid our $30/person, we were going to stay.

Next up, the roller coaster.  Now, the amusement park, for whatever reason, had a vague American Old West theme.  But the roller coaster went in and around a volcano - not something you see a lot of in Arizona in the 1800s.  But okay, whatever.  After an hour-plus wait in line we were up.  During the wait we had noticed that the safety bar on the last car wouldn't lock down.  The ride attendant kept having to hit and kick it, and he only got it locked down about 50% of the time.  At first he wasn't putting passengers in that car, but a manager came by and pointed at all the folks waiting, so he loaded up that car.  And yeah, guess which car Robert and I drew when it was our turn?  We refused.  He sagged, and installed us in another car, leaving that one empty.

The coaster was fairly flat and uninteresting, thank God, except for two things.  On the way out and the way back, it went into the side of the big papier-mache volcano, twisted around in there for a bit, then came out the other side.  The inside of the volcano was completely unfinished, undecorated, and full of scaffolding.  There were signs of work in progress everywhere, from the bucket of oil-soaked rags to the still-burning cigarette on the papier-mache ledge next to them.  We were not comfortable.  We christened the park "Tortway Lagoon" right then and there. Then we exited the volcano and found ourselves on an aerial track above the waterpark.  EIGHTY FEET above the waterpark.  We looked at each other and said "Wow, glad we're not in that last car.  That's a helluva drop."

After the roller coaster we decided to head to the waterpark.  Carl's face was a bit swollen, but the bleeding had stopped and he claimed it wasn't too painful.  We'd been told there was a food court near the changing rooms, so we got into our swimsuits and stared at the one fastfood window.  The choices were unappealing: nasi goreng and mee, both swimming in grease; this stuff made with duck feet that you could get at most vendor carts but none of us liked, and something resembling chicken nuggets, cooked in palm oil.  (One of the painful things about Malaysia for me was my heretofore unknown but massively unpleasant palm oil allergy - but I was pretty used to sucking it up, eating palm oil, and dealing with the cramping and other assorted GI joys an hour later). We ate, doffed our swimsuit covers, and headed into the park. We knew we'd get looks - blonde, gorgeous, tan Jenny; slender, blonde Leigh, and blindingly-white, ample-bosomed me, all in bikinis.  What we didn't expect was the out-and-out staring and snickers of "orang buti" and "gwailo."  Ah well, whatev. 

Now, the kindest way to account for the rest of Tortway Lagoon is that Malaysia is a Muslim country without a cultural background of swimming, so they probably never expected girls or women, or men over the age of 15, to go on any of the attractions.  At least, they were all built to tolerances that might've been okay for a 70-pound, 4-foot-tall person, but were a bit...difficult...for a gigantic heavy Westerner. 

The first ride we did was the toboggan ride.  You sit on a sled at the top of a slide, then the ledge drops out and you sled down at high speed into a pool.  Unless you are over 70 pounds, when you sled down at high speed, hit the pool, hydroplane out the far edge, skid across the couple meters of astroturf and slam into the concrete wall.  If you try to lean to brake the sled, you skid across the astroturf on your side, rather than comfortably on the sled. Jenny and Leigh were the first down this slide, and suffered the worst of the carpet burns and impact bruises, but Allen as the tallest and heaviest almost went all the way over the concrete wall. So that was fun.

Nursing our concussions and a little wobbly, we headed for the chutes.  No sleds here, just a slide with curved walls, like a bobsled run, with water pouring down it.  Because no one else was going on the water rides (see above, re: Muslim country), it was easy to commandeer both slides, so Robert and Allen decided they would race each other down, like speed-sledders, on their backs, feet first, with their arms crossed over their chests.  Unfortunately we had the weight-tolerance issue again - the segments of each slide weren't joined well, so every couple feet the guys went over a sharp edge.  It was something like a long blue cheese grater.  Waiting at the bottom, we noticed the water coming out the chute had turned bloody, and then saw the guys crash into the shallow pool, streaming blood from their elbows and shoulder blades.  Allen, being insane, went and did it again, this time against Carl, and got even more zested.

Giving up on that ride, we went to the curly slides.  These are the completely enclosed tubes that twist and turn.  Allen and Carl had had enough, so they wandered over to look at the human stew that was the wave pool.  The rest of us went down the curly slides - Robert and Leigh first, then me and Jenny.  At some point about halfway down, I slewed up the side of the curve and dropped on my head.  I was immediately knocked unconscious, but Robert and Jenny told me what happened: Robert saw me plop out of the slide totally limp and go under water in the pool.  He yelled to Jenny, who had just come out her slide, to help me.  She was a little woozy herself, but found me and pulled me up - the water was only about a meter deep - not noticing immediately that my bikini top had come off.  A group of 4 or 5 Malaysian men noticed, though, and started taking photos.  Robert had thrown himself in the pool to get to me, so all he could do was yell at them, but Jenny relinquished me to him and launched herself at the guys screaming.  That was when I came to, in time to see them quail and flee in terror and wonder what the hell just happened.

We met up with the other guys at the wave pool, which was packed to bursting with Malaysian boys.  Between the unpleasantness of doing anything with 300 10-year-old boys, a lot of the adults waiting were pointing at us and commenting.  We looked at each other and realized that in addition to being mostly naked and white, we were bruised, swollen, still streaming blood, and generally looked like we'd been in a fight.  Even Carl had to give up at this point, although he did say that it was a memorable birthday.

Coda: A week later we read in the newspaper that a woman and two little boys died when they came out of the last car on the roller coaster and fell the 80 feet. to the concrete of the waterpark.  Suddenly "Tortway Lagoon" seemed an entirely understated name.