Tim Roxborogh's travel bugs: Know-it-all travellers who are blatantly wrong

Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photo / Getty Images

A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday, by Tim Roxborogh.

It's a shame "I told you so" is a both a sentence and a notion you're meant to outgrow once adulthood hits. Sure, it's unbecoming to be smug when proven right, but sometimes it feels like such an opportunity missed to not say it. Like late last year when an expat living in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia started harping on to everyone in an extra loud voice that the public can only go halfway to the top of the city's iconic 88-storey Petronas Towers.

Sure, once upon a time he would've been right, but that was years ago. More than that, he was choosing quite the place to woefully get his facts wrong: indeed, he was half way up the towers at the time. "Well folks, this is as high as we're going to get I'm afraid." He was showing around four overseas friends, but his over-confident voice had enough decibels to fill the entire sky-bridge that links the two towers at levels 41 and 42. The point being, he was effectively informing as many as 30 tourists of differing nationalities that they would not, after all, be making it to the top of one of the most famous structures in the world.

You book your ticket (sometimes as early as the previous day), you get an assigned time and then you are herded into groups of a manageable size to visit first the sky-bridge, and then secondly, the level 86 observation deck. This means you see KL from 170 metres above the ground as well as 360 metres (spires make up most of the rest of the 452 metres). If you're lucky, as we were, and it's a blue-sky day, you're treated to a skyline as dynamic and futuristic as any in Asia. The whole tour takes about 45 minutes.

Somehow our loud-voiced friend hadn't paid much attention to the ticket-buying process because surely he would've seen all the signs talking about level 86. So I let him know. As we waited for the lift on level 41 — a lift he thought was returning us to ground level and a lift I knew to be taking us another 45 floors higher — I chimed in. "You used to only be able to go to the sky-bridge, but they take you to the top now too."

That had to be enough to set him straight. "You're wrong sorry," he replied before patronising me with, "I live here and you don't get any higher than this". Given I was 100 per cent certain I was right, I decided to press on:

"I used to live here too and it definitely now includes a ride to the top where they've built a whole new observation area." He wasn't having a bar of it and hit back with, "I think you might be getting confused with the KL Tower — you can go to the top of that and that's what you're thinking of". All righty then.

A minute or so later the lift doors opened and we stepped inside. Sure enough the lift started to rise and with it my euphoric feelings of vindication. Waiting for my apology, the know-it-all jerk with the booming voice turned his back on me, I can only assume in shame. "I told you so", I grumbled under my breath, but loud enough for my wife to elbow me in the stomach.

Kauri dieback and the closure of the Waitakeres

I can't believe this isn't a bigger story. I know it's being reported on and I know some people are talking about it, but are we distraught enough? Because the fact the bulk of the Waitakere Ranges may be closed to the public (and of course, to tourists too) because of the scourge of Kauri Dieback is devastating. With this rainforest so precious and the plight of kauri trees so precarious, this may be the right decision, but to think of an Auckland where the Waitakeres are off-limits is staggering. The fact most people seem blase about it is almost as distressing.

Tim Roxborogh hosts Newstalk ZB's The Two, Coast Soul on iHeartRadio and writes the RoxboroghReport.com