Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Trip Start
Aug 31, 2008
1
17
47
Trip End
Apr 30, 2009
Kuala Lumpur,
Wilayah Persekutuan,
Malaysia
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
The flight to Kuala Lumpur was surprisingly affordable, especially considering that we were only booking the flight a couple hours in advance. The timing was rather convenient, as we didn't really have to wait around the airport at all. Our flight to Bangkok would've been hours later, so there was at least one advantage to this flight cancelation in that we didn't have to chill in the Jakarta airport all day long. After our refund (for the "free" flight we had booked months ago), we only had to pay an extra 1,000,000 Rp for both tickets to K.L.
We arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the afternoon and soon found out that the airport offered free wireless Internet. We were also quite hungry and soon made our way to McDonalds for a late lunch. K.L. has two airports and we were at the Low Cost Carrier Terminal (or LCC-T for short). Air Asia and another company offered shuttle bus service to the Central Station in the downtown area for 9 RM (8 RM for the other company). The LCC-T is a good distance outside of the city and it took nearly an hour to drive into the city. I was surprised to see what an efficient and modern highway system this city had, but once we got into the downtown area traffic seized up and we moved at a snail's pace the rest of the way. By the time we arrived at the central station, we had spent around 80 minutes on the Air Asia bus.
We had prepared detailed instructions on how to get to the Serai Inn & Hostel from the airport, and this was just the first step. The next step was to jump on the light rail transit system (LRT), which had a station in the same building that we had just been dropped off at. There later found out that there are several lines that comprised the K.L LRT, but fortunately we were dropped off on the right one and just needed to ride it for two more stations before getting off and walking the rest of the way. The cost of the LRT is based off of how far you are going, so it ended up costing us only RM 1.30 each.
Serai Inn & Hostel provided very detailed instructions, so for the last step of this trip we walked according to their description. It was easy to follow and within 10 minutes we were there. We booked a private room with A/C which cost us RM 69 a night. We chose this establishment because it was described much like a full featured hostel and it didn't disappoint us. There was free wireless Internet, a communal kitchen, included breakfast (toast and jam), free coffee/tea all day long, TV with satellite service (lots of English channels), and hot showers on every floor.
The Serai Inn & Hostel is run by a husband and wife team with a very friendly staff and it was kept as clean as humanly possible. The Internet was the fastest we had seen in a long while (megabit), so we were constantly uploading the backlog of video clips that we had accumulated in Indonesia. It was also quite refreshing to have a warm shower again. We didn't really need warm showers in Indonesia, but now that we had a nicely air-conditioned room, I must've spent 30 minutes in the shower. It was the first warm shower I had in months and I had nearly forgotten how enjoyable a warm shower can be.
The upstairs of this establishment was a communal area with a kitchen and a lounge area with the satellite TV. Aside from the TV that got HBO in Indonesia, we hadn't seen much English speaking television stations in the past three months so we spent much of our first night watching the History Network and National Geographic channel specials. Of course we also closely monitored BBC and CNN to see what was happening in Bangkok. The situation was getting worse if anything as the protesters had moved in on the cities 2nd (older) airport to prevent the prime minister from returning from a summit he attended in Lima, Peru. The tactic had worked, but now the city was isolated entirely from the outside world and we were stuck in Malaysia.
One of the best things that we immediately noticed about Malaysia was the diversity of cultures. There was substantial Malay, Chinese and Indian populations which made up this country and each culture had their own restaurants for us to try out. The Malay culture is quite similar to Indonesian culture with both being Muslim in religion and speaking somewhat the same language. Since we had spent the last three months enjoying the Indonesian and Chinese food, we mostly searched out Indian restaurants while we were in Malaysia. One of my favorite aspects of Indian food is the availability of fresh bread, namely Roti or Naan, with nearly every meal.
I had expected Malaysia to be the most expensive country that we were going to be visiting on this eight month tour of Asia (unless we spent an unplanned stint in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea or Japan somehow), but the prices were generally lower than I expected. The street food was easy to find in a much higher quality than we had gotten used to in Indonesia. We wandered around the city and would find entire streets that had dozens of assorted food stands set up on it. They were all generally quite busy with a mostly local clientele, which prompted us to try a few of them.
We found chicken tandoori for 5 RM and onion, cheese, & garlic naan bread for 1.50 to 3 RM each. We both thoroughly enjoyed both and often ended up ordering second helpings of the naan (especially the cheese variety). Everywhere we ordered the naan or roti bread, it was always served with an assortment of dips. The cheaper places only provided one dip of curry, but some of the more expensive places provided as many as three (hot & spicy, fish curry, etc.)
One thing that seems to be expensive in Malaysia is alcohol. A large bottle of beer (620 ml) starts at around 12 RMB and it gets more expensive from there. This makes sense considering the Muslim dominated government which discourages the consumption of alcohol via tax. However many of the stores selling alcohol had signs up stating that alcohol was for sale only to non-Muslim customers. I believe it is illegal for Muslims to be drinking alcohol in Malaysia altogether, so I presume the Indian and Chinese citizens are not overly happy about the excessive tax level on alcohol products that only they (and tourists) have to pay. Knowing that we'll soon be in Thailand, I resisted drinking alcohol for the most of our stay in Malaysia.
After a few days in Kuala Lumpur, we realized that the protests in Bangkok's airports were not going to end in time for us to use our Air Asia tickets. Their policy stated that we could redeem similar tickets up to three days later at no extra charge, but it wasn't looking like the protests would end in time for us to use our second ticket which flew us from Bangkok to Chiang Mai on November 30th, 2008 (or even three days after that.) It is a pity that we could only receive credits on these tickets and not replacement tickets because we had booked these tickets months in advance at a rate that could not be matched now. In fact the tickets were free; we only had to pay the fuel surcharge and taxes on both of them.
We decided that it would probably be smart to just avoid Bangkok for the time being and fortunately Air Asia has flights directly from Kuala Lumpur to Chiang Mai. They were a little more expensive than other flights to Thailand though, so we decided to book a week in advance to cut down on the expense. There seemed to be lots of other people with the same idea and there were not really any more cheap tickets to be had in the short term.
Lisa traveled to the Air Asia office in the Central train station to get a refund on our tickets from Bangkok to Chiang Mai and pay for the new tickets at the same time. The Air Asia office was a zoo, and Lisa had to wait in a room for over one hundred people before her. It was lucky that she got there early in the day though, because by the time she left the queue had grown to 500 people. Considering that she had to wait around four hours for just 100 people, there was going to be problems for anybody with 500 people in front of them. At least she got the tickets, but it ended up costing us an extra 730 RM on top of our exchanged tickets to the same place.
Since our flight to Chiang Mai was still a week away, we decided we should travel around Malaysia a little bit. Unfortunately our travel guide books (including the one for Malaysia) were all sent to us in a package that was waiting in Chiang Mai, but with free Internet at the Serai Inn & Hostel, we found out that Melaka was a popular place for tourists that we were not planning on seeing for our planned stay in Malaysia (in March of 2009). Melaka was also quite easy to get to from Kuala Lumpur, as it was just a 2.25 hour bus ride from the bus station that we could walk to. However we were warned that Melaka is a popular domestic tourist destination, especially on weekends and holidays, so we decided to make reservations for a place called Ringo's Foyer Guest House via the Internet (hstelbookers.com).
We spent a total of five nights in Kuala Lumpur before heading off to Melaka. During our stay there we walked around the city and took pictures of some of the famous landmarks. One morning we tried to get up to the "sky-walk", which is the bridge connecting the two Petronas towers (the tallest twin towers in the world), but we went on a Monday morning and it was not open on Mondays. It is actually free to go on the sky-walk, but since they only allow 1200 people a day to go on it, we had to get there early to ensure we would get a ticket. We made it there for shortly after 8 AM, but it was hard to guess if that was early enough since they were closed that day.
We checked out of Serai Inn & Hostel on December 2nd and walked to the bus station which was about a ten minute walk away. We were able to book a ticket to Melaka for only an hour after we arrived, which just gave us enough time to run to the Kentucky Fried Chicken for some lunch. The bus was comfortable, especially compared to the awful public buses that we rode in Indonesia. There was air conditioning and only four padded seats per row, much like the usual public coaches used in Canada. The tickets cost 12.10 RM each and the bus got us to Melaka bus station on time.
