Lumped with Kuala Lumpur
Trip Start
Jan 02, 2009
1
21
34
Trip End
Dec 07, 2009
Kuala Lumpur,
Wilayah Persekutuan,
Malaysia
Monday, July 20, 2009
We spent the entire morning looking around the area known as the Golden Triangle for alternative accommodation. Unfortunately, as it was the weekend and also a public holiday in Malaysia, most of the hotels were full. After checking at the tenth hotel, we finally found a room in a guesthouse. The only room they had left was their "Presidential Suite", which was actually a large split-level room at the back of the hotel. It had been designed in a supposedly trendy minimal style with grey concrete walls and a stone floor, but as it only had one very small window which was above eye-level, it felt as if we were in a dungeon. The woman that managed the hotel was pleasant enough, but we were given the third degree every time we came in or went out. She insisted on knowing where we going, where we had been, what we were having for lunch and what we were carrying in our bags. After a couple of these interrogations, we were tempted to tell her that we had been out scoring crack cocaine and that we had just invited a couple of hookers back to the hotel for a party.
There is not a great deal of particular interest to see in KL, but it is a pleasant enough city with good shopping, some great restaurants and also some very stylish bars. We both hate shopping malls, but as it was so unbearably hot, humid and also rainy, spending time in an air-conditioned mall actually turned out to be quite a pleasurable experience for once.
One morning, we queued up to bag a couple of free tickets to view the Petronas Towers at sunset. The payoff was that we had to sit through a very dull Petronas promotional video lasting 20 minutes wearing Mike Reid style 3-D glasses before we were allowed in. The Towers are 88 stories high and at 452m are the tallest twin towers in the world. Unfortunately, there was no sunset to be seen that evening as we walked across the skybridge which connects the two towers on the 41st Floor. However, we did witness a fairly spectacular thunderstorm across the city and it was quite something to watch the bolts of lightening from 170m above the ground.
As there are so many good restaurants in KL, we decided to celebrate the 6 month anniversary of the day we started travelling at a restaurant that Dean had read an excellent review of. Coincidentally, it also happened to be in the same street as our guesthouse. However, when we arrived, we discovered that it had moved premises three months previously, but that the owners had helpfully left a map and directions on a notice outside. From the map, we calculated that it would take 10 minutes to walk there. An hour later, feeling hot, grumpy, tired and hungry, we finally found the place. The restaurant was in a very large room which, although quite stylish, was very brightly lit and not very welcoming. Each dining table and chair was in a different style and different colour and there were numerous sofas and other pieces of furniture strangely positioned in the room. It was only after we had started tucking into our first course that we realised there were price tags on everything – the table, the chairs, the paintings on the walls, even the cutlery and we found it quite difficult to enjoy our food with tags banging against our noses. We then realised that we were eating dinner in a furniture showroom. It transpired that even the kitchen units and the cooker were for sale!
We were still feeling pretty jaded with big cities at this point, and were also getting rather fed up with the constant wet weather in Malaysia, so as soon as we had sorted out our visas for Indonesia and had booked our flights to Bali, we left KL after 3 days.
