'We are still at square one': How the world's attention drifted away from the MH370 story

So, when will you come to KL again, sir?” asked the hotel receptionist as I fumbled for my cigarette pack in my pocket before my cab arrived.

I was so exhausted I had to pause and think before I replied. “When they find the plane,” I said with a weary smile.

The day I left Kuala Lumpur and returned home to Singapore, I had an unfamiliar and unsettling feeling.

Something just wasn’t right.

But when it came to the MH370 saga, there was no light at the end of the tarmac. Indeed, right now we are still at square one.

Flight MH370 went missing on March 8. After about three to four weeks, media interest began to wane. It was getting extremely tough to find anything new to report on. One by one, members of the international media, including myself, had our final drinks at the hotel bar, exchanged e-mail addresses, added each other on Twitter and said our goodbyes.

There was a cloud of haze shrouding parts of the capital’s skyline due to nearby forest and bush fires during the first few days.

'Will I ever see you again?' Wife keeps 100-day diary of hope and despair as MH370 hunt goes on

The hazy conditions uncannily mirrored the confusing atmosphere at the media centre. As if highly speculative stories weren’t bad enough, the utterly bizarre communique with Malaysian authorities made everything worse. They were providing the media with much fodder to write about their incompetency and gaffes – many of which were too shocking to ignore.

Most of us would reserve seats by placing bags or simply grabbing a seat two or three hours before the scheduled time.

Every morning and late at night, the staff at the hotel I was staying at would ask me for updates. Initially their question was: “Have they found it?”

I would always indulge and give them a standard two minute spiel on what had transpired. Soon, I needed another minute to debunk conspiracy theories they had picked up online.

At the nearby coffee shop where I had my late night dinners, the roti canai cook would ask me for daily updates too. The coffee shop had two TV screens. I asked him if he watched the pressers on TV daily.

“The radio and TV is always running but there’s no point. I have no idea what these people are talking about,” he said.

One of the reasons for the lack of understanding and the confusion was made clear to me during the first week. My first few stories from KL included a profile piece on the country’s civil aviation chief and it required me to get background information on the man and why there were so many gaffes initially.

That’s when I learnt the various government agencies weren’t used to talking to one another and being coordinated. According to a senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, there were also some egos that needed to be stroked and it wasn’t easy for cooperation to take place between different governmental stakeholders.

In Beijing, the stories always involved the family members at the briefings at Lido Hotel. But in Malaysia, it was different.

Spending considerable time at the Sama-Sama Hotel and away from the family members made it tough sometimes to remember that actual human lives were involved. There was a disconnect and a distance from the human element of the story, especially because it wasn’t very easy to reach out to the family members, many of whom had been housed at different hotels with very tight security.

The look on a particular young teenager’s face as he approached the hotel to attend the briefing is something that I won’t be able to forget. His face was blank. It was worse than seeing someone who was horrified. It was a look I had not seen before, not even at the saddest funeral I’ve attended.

In the initial weeks, most reporters always ended up there after filing their stories or completing their live reports. The service was terrible, but where else were you going to go?

After the first week though, the bar was totally tapped out of Tiger and Heineken beer. And as if wanting to taunt us, the pub band played classics like Leaving On a Jet Plane and Hotel California where the line “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave” struck a chord with a couple of journalists.

And 24 hours before I left KL, I called one of the affected family members I had been in close touch with. I thanked him for all the time he had given me over the previous four weeks.

I also informed him that I was leaving and that quite a lot of the reporters were packing up too. “When will they give us the information we want?” he asked. I didn’t know what to say to the man whose beloved son had been on the flight.

We spoke about his health and his family for a while. He thanked me for calling him and wished me a safe journey home.

I couldn’t help but notice the cruel coincidence of the 100-day mark falling on Father’s Day on Sunday.

They say time heals everything. That’s probably not true in this case, I think. Without any closure and world attention drifting to other topics, each day might just be a bigger black hole than the previous one.