OK, the “fun” of arranging to pick the bike from the port started today. I actually arrived to Port Kelang in the afternoon after I slept through my alarm clock signal again and missed couple of busses to KL.
When I found Jardine Shipping Agencies’ offices one of the first things I was told was that I can’t go through the whole process myself and that I will have to appoint a forwarding agent. I was taken to a forwarding company residing only two storeys up straight away. The initial estimate of all charges was almost 900 Ringgit!! That would be more than I paid for the whole 5000km over-sea shipping from Australia and IN Autralia (where one would expect the charges to be higher for the simple reason that man-hours are more expensive). Naturally I was hesitant to say “Yes, go ahead and arrange it for me.” In fact, I felt stupid that I haven’t sent my bike over here by plane as Gareth did, since the total with this charge would almost be higher then he paid for no-hassle door-to-door immediate delivery of his, twice as heavy a bike. Damn!
On a suggestion of the “forwarding” lady I went to hunt around for a better price. There is a few forwarding companies in the vicinity of Jardine. The result was that this first agent was the cheapest. That felt horrible! - Especially because I’m having problems with money on my account at this point of time, for reasons not worth mentioning. Let’s only hope that it is only a temporary state.
By the end of the day I came to the decision that I will try to arrange the whole process myself even though the people in Jardine told me that they can’t deal with anybody else than a forwarding company and that there is a law in Malaysia that I can’t for example deal with customs in cases of shipped cargo. They would apparently not talk to me at all. So when I came back to Jardine before the end of business hours I insisted that I will try myself anyway, against all the things that they are telling me. So they gave me the one document that I apparently needed at customs and I went to an adjacent hotel to spend the night. I had a Chinese dinner for 2.30 Ringgit (including Chinese tea!) and went to bed relatively early so that I can get up early tomorrow and be at the customs office complex as soon as they open at 8:15AM.
Tomorrow will be a risk as I could spend quite a bit of money for taxis going about 15km to customs on one side and then to the port 20km on the other, I decided to take that risk as one can’t believe everything he or she hears (especially from companies making profit from you) and the estimated amount is so high that a few charges for taxis would get lost in the total sum anyway if worst came to worst.