So after the brilliant birthday party at Chetan’s house and all the hoo-haa of Bukit Bintang, we went off to a blissful sleep to wake up at 6 a.m. After a good breakfast, we proceeded to travel through the KL public transport to go to Sepang. The taxis were having a field day charging around 150-200 ringgits just to take people to Sepang and get them back!

The Komuter was actually good! It was clean and neat and was air conditioned! But the most important draw back of Komuter trains are they are extremely slow. Or maybe it was just the distance! I dont know. We reached Sepang and realised why it was the hottest racing track in the world. It was BURNING! It was as if somebody placed a magnifying glass on that part of Malaysia! To add to my woes, I was wearing jeans and shoes! Argh…cant forget the 45 minutes we had to spend standing or walking in the heat to get to our stand.

The funny part in getting to the stand is the security checks. They dont allow water, umbrellas, or food! And just a few meters away, people were throwing their water bottles and food stuff over the fence so that after the security checks they can go to the other side and collect them! Security at its worst! One of my friends tried another clever trick. He put a half-filled water bottle in the front of his bag and kept the other at the back. The security “found” the half filled bottle and then took it out and stopped checking! =)

This is what you get to see once you are inside the stand. Thankfully it was covered! I do not know how those in the stands without the shade coped!

Once we settled ourselves on the cosy bedsheets that Ayekay had thoughtfully brought along, we started munching on the food stuff that we managed to sneak in. The qualifying round just got over and we were waiting for the carrera race to start. I wanted to try my hand at sketching as there was a lot of time before the race started.

Ayekay had meanwhile captured the view that I was drawing! So now I can complete the sketch at home!

One thing I could notice was the profusion of Indian flags! Some of our other friends and seniors from NTU also brought along an Indian flag and it was as if a cricket match was going to start!

A smaller race then started with these funny cars. Not that I cared much about these cars :P

Ayekay was playing around with his binoculars to swat away his boredom and figured out there was a good way of taking pictures without a zoom lens, through the binoculars. With the dexterity that only those-who-know-to-use-binoculars-with-cameras can have, he got some cool snaps. But of course the snaps have a blue tinge because of that. But photoshop can always help in that regard!

The big race started and the Renault raced to a lead leaving a big gap between the Renault and the rest of the cars. Another big gap was between the rest of the cars and the last three. And our Indian boy, for whom so many indian flags were splattered all over the stadium, was the best of the three in the opening lap.

The race was interesting and even gripping in parts. But as we didnt have the full view of the track we missed most of the parts that the newspapers reported on later. We simply saw that the ferraris were doing badly and Karthikeyan’s car was atrocious to say the least.

Deepak and myself had an early bus to catch so we decamped from the stadium by 4.30 while the race was supposed to end at 5. Already, people were moving out of the stadium in hordes and we luckily managed to catch a bus that was dropping us off at Nilai a Komuter station from where we had to take the Komuter to the Old KL station to take the bus to Singapore.

The bus journey from Nilai to Sepang was quick, in less than 15 minutes, but the return back was disastrous. We had budgeted for a 10 minute journey that will leave us comfortably early enough to have a dinner and take the bus to singapore. But the journey back took more than 45 minutes! I had no clue how they managed to find such a long winded way. It was very cinematic and I thought we were participating in the Amazong Race, we ran and ran and ran and finally managed to board the bus to Singapore with two minutes to spare.

Whew! I promptly fell asleep in the bus and managed to wake up for some light dinner on the malaysian soil before the picture perfect greenery of singapore greeted us and the humdrum of daily life beckoned.