Tom's Travels: Kuala Lumpur Day 1

23 - 31 October 2013

Day 1: Flying over
The flight wasn't as bad as I was dreading. I watched The Hangover 3, Now You See Me, World War Z and the start of The Internship plus I even had a bit of a sleep, which I was pleased with because it meant that during my travels, I'd gotten a bit better at sleeping on transport. The food was great too, I don't know why everyone knocks airplane food.

Getting to the hostel
Kuala Lumpur has a train, the KLIA Ekspres, which makes getting into town simple. It's a half hour ride and you get to see some of the countryside too, which is extremely green and lush with some farms and pockets of huge buildings. I then had to catch the metro two stops and it was really well set up with machines that let you buy tokens (in English) and it's also super cheap; you can go pretty much anywhere for 30 Australian cents. I did arrive at peak hour so I had to squish into the train but it wasn't so crowded that I couldn't fit.

Rooftop bar
Once I was at the hostel, The Reggae Mansion, I had a bit of a nap before heading up to the rooftop bar. The drinks aren't cheap (but still cheaper than Australia) but you get a pretty good view of the KL Tower and the Petronas Towers. Everyone at the bar seemed really friendly because I joined a table of people and started having a chat. Another Aussie guy and I ordered a beer tower but for the rest of the night we were drinking buckets because it was cheaper than beer.

There was also a guy on the mic organising activities and I didn't think of it before he said it but he told everyone to stop calling him Mr Chow (from the Hangover) and it was hilarious because he really did sound and look like him. I think he might own the bar so hopefully he doesn't read this.

When the bar closed we organised a bus to take us to the street with all the pubs, not that I had any idea where that was, and we carried the party on there. I caught a taxi with some other guys who said they were going to the reggae hostel but it turns out there are a few of them so I ended up not really where I wanted to be. I think I was actually quite close to my hostel but I had no idea so I walked for about 20 minutes in the wrong direction and then had to walk all the way back, all the while with only 4% battery on my phone and trying to decipher the map. I eventually made it home at 5am, not such a good way to beat jet lag.

Day 2: Petronas Towers and Batu Caves
I made it to breakfast, not feeling too awesome, but it was a great breakfast with wedges and fried noodles. Just the thing I felt like. Much later in the day, once everyone was feeling up to it, we headed out to go see the Petronas Towers and the absolutely spotless park next to it. We wanted to see the fountain show at the towers but because it was still daylight and there wasn't anything to do to kill time, we caught the train out to Batu Caves. The caves are very impressive with a huge flight of stairs (271 actually) and some huge statues. There are also monkeys that are cute but also really cunning so we had a few laughs seeing them steal water bottles from people.

At the top of the stairs, in the cave, there are a few chickens walking around, which isn't something I expected to see. There were also lots of pigeons at the top and bottom of the stairs. We took some photos before heading back into town.

Now it was dark, we went back to the Petronas Towers and got some dinner in the food court. I ordered something that was meant to be chicken noodles but the "chicken" had a really strange texture to it, like it was too soft. Not one of the best dishes I had in KL but trying new things, eh? We missed the fountain show but we went out and took the mandatory photos in front of the towers.

To the bar!
This is starting to be like Athens because we went back to the rooftop bar again tonight. We played a few games of pool this time and I'm not very good but I'm proud to say that I pulled off some really lucky shots. The night ran pretty late again and at the end we ended up at McDonalds, which broke my "no fast food" streak that was running for a few years before that, oh well. I ended up in bed at 4am, still not beating that jet lag.

Day 3: Lazy day
I didn't achieve a lot today although I did go exploring and found some great nasi goreng. The hostel has a cinema in it and one of the movies they were offering was Fast and Furious 6 but they need a minimum of 3 people to play a movie. I couldn't find 2 friends so I paid for 3 tickets, which was still cheaper than a movie ticket in Australia.

Day 4: Shopping centres
I made breakfast early today and it's a totally different crowd to the one that comes later. There were a lot of Asian school kids, but I don't think they stay at the hostel, they just come to eat.

The day's mission was to go exploring and the first stop was Jalan Bintang, which is a street that has a lot of shopping centres and they're all massive! I walked through a few of them and they all seem to have 12 floors and so much space that the top floors are either empty or not filled. One of them even had a theme park INSIDE of it (the park is called Times Square). I also had a look in the Low Yat Plaza (I keep thinking low fat), which is completely filled with tech stuff.

Day 5: Theme park
My friend from Seattle, that I first met in Paris, turned up today. We hadn't planned to meet up, it just randomly happened 5 months after we both met and after we'd both been travelling through two different continents.

I suggested that we should go to the theme park that I found yesterday and an Aussie guy and my friend were keen so that was the plan. On the way to the theme park, we stopped past some of the computer stores to see if we could get photos recovered from a dead SD card but no-one seemed to know what was going on with it. I get the feeling they were more into sales than fixing things.

The park wasn't very busy so we had the chance to ride the rides multiple times. We did the roller coaster (Supersonic Odyssey) three times, the Space Attack twice, Ooort's Express once and the DNA Mixer once. Once on the DNA Mixer was even too much because we were all sporting a hangover and it shook up things in us that we didn't want shaken.

After the theme park we went for a wander through the mall and in Tiny Taipei we found a store that sold waffles on a stick, so we had to give them a try.

KL Tower
The next stop was the KL Tower. It wasn't that far away but it did start raining while we were walking there so we got a bit wet but it wasn't cold so it wasn't all that bad. When we arrived at the base of the tower it was still quite foggy but we decided to pay to go up to the observation deck anyway. It turned out to be fine because we stayed up long enough to see the flog get blown away and it also got dark. This meant we got "day" and "night" photos from up there. As we left the tower, it was still raining lightly but we could hear a strange noise. After a few seconds I figured out that it was a stream of water landing on car roofs and noticed that it was moving. It turned out to be a stream of water falling all the way from the top of the tower and the wind was blowing it around. Obviously we all looked up to see where it was coming from but just as my two friends did, the wind blew the stream of water right over them so they got slammed in the face with huge rain drops. Rain is dangerous stuff! After some swearing, everyone was ok and we headed off to get dinner.

On the way back to the hostel we had to avoid some drunk guys who were hiding in a shop and throwing firecrackers at people who walked past in the street to scare them. We made it back and hit the rooftop bar again for some drinks and played some pool.

Day 6: Deja Vu
6 days is a long time to stay in one place when you're travelling. It also means that you'll probably be on your second set of friends because the other lot have already left. My current bunch of friends hadn't seen the Batu Caves yet and because they're free (the caves, not the friends), I was happy to go see them again.

Just like last time, we saw water bottles stolen:

The Aussie guy that was with us had a bag of chips and an ice cream and the monkeys wanted both. They weren't afraid to jump up to try and grab them and in the end, he decided he'd sacrifice the ice cream to distract them some we could get away. He throws the ice cream just before the video starts.

Back at the hostel we watched a movie: Side Effects and then went over to the Petronas Towers to take photos and get something for dinner. After the towers we headed back to the hostel to the rooftop bar. At the bar I learnt a trick for the perfect high five every time; look at the other person's elbow, not their hand.

Although I'd already seen all the tourist things we did today, I still had really good fun because the people you do it with are what makes it worth it.

Day 7: Taking it easy
I was running out of energy so today was a recovery day. My Seattleite friend and I went shopping for a KL magnet and tried to get an ice cream sandwich from Chinatown because it looked interesting but they didn't have any.

In the afternoon I watched the movie Oblivion with a Danish friend before we went out to find something for dinner. We ended up at a restaurant where they seemed to have a bunch of people working there who'd be assigned to customers and do everything for them. So the guy who served us also went out the back and cooked the food and served it to us. I guess it's a good business model to encourage people to work hard.

In the evening, a bunch of English lads that I met in my room and I tried to go to the SkyBar. It shouldn't have been that difficult but we couldn't get a taxi that would take 5 people and one of the guy's shorts split as we ran across the road so we chalked it up as a fail and went to the rooftop bar because it was easy.

Day 8: Last day
Today was really about killing time before the flight. I did some blogging, bought some sunnies in Chinatown, wandered through the shopping mall district again and found an arcade to play a few video games in before catching the train out to the airport.

The flight went fine and I got to watch the rest of The Internship as well as The Great Gatsby and part of The Lone Ranger.

I was pleased that Australian customs let me bring in the cheese I'd bought in Amsterdam as a present, so we're off to a good start.

Welcome homes don't get much better than my family meeting me at the airport to take me home. During the drive home I felt like everything was so open because all the houses are single story and so spread out. It's probably because I'd spent most of the past 5 months in big cities.

Thoughts on Kuala Lumpur:

there's so much advertising for Samsung (and phones/gadgets in general) and fast food like McDonalds, KFC and Burger King
most local people are dressed very smartly, despite it being hot
there are some really tall buildings
most of the city and roads are in good condition but, like any city, there are still some poor, run-down bits
it's quite humid, but not so much that you can't survive however it's perfect at night
public transport is cheap but still frequent, punctual, clean, all that good stuff.
it has that "Asia" smell, which may just be humidity. I like it though
all the buses are turbo diesel and the have no mufflers on them so they're stupidly loud. The drivers drive them like race cars too, which sounds pretty funny
lots of pedestrian crossing have no lights so you just have to make a mad dash across the road