Kuala Lumpur Hotels
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Kuala Lumpur
Entry 29 of 32 | show all | print this entry |
Arrivng in Kuala Lumpur ("KL" to most locals) was a bit of a stressful event; we'd been told about a good place to stay and proceeded to walk around in the sweltering Malaysian midday with our big bags on our backs trying to find this place, after about half an hour of walking, sweating and swearing we found it and it was too expensive, great. A bloke offered us somewhere cheaper and showed us his place which was a dump and said he had a sister hotel which was better, took us around the backa and showed us the back entrance. We eventually paid a cab driver over the odd to take us to Chinatown and found a place that was cheap, mostly because it looked like the setting for a serial killer film showdown and the rooms were prison cells. Christ, the first hour anywhere is always the worst.
So as I said before, we stayed in Chinatown which wasn't really much of a Chinatown anymore, at least they didn't have Chinese street names and 7.50 all you can eat buffets like in London (I'm pretty sure that's what China is like X 10,000,000), but it was still filled with rather old buildings, many of which had survived for a good century or so, not bad in a city where there are a huge amount of new high rise buildings and modern apartments. Chinatown also had Petalin Street running through it, a street dedicated to forgery which would put many a dodgy English market to shame and would make Louis Vuitton, Johhny Prada or Dave Gucci cry. More about that later.
KL is actually a fairly small city, the city centre is walkable if you really want and its not as smelly or oppressive as Bankok which makes it quite a pleasent place to do just that. Nevertheless, they have a good transport system so we didn't bother, finding the stations was hard enough anyway. We spent 5 days in Kl which was probably long enough to get bored unfortunately, might not have been the case had we plenty of money to spend on sky restaurants and glamorous shopping centres, life being hat it is though, we were restricted to plastic dining tables on street corners and window shopping. Still, we managed to get a fair bit done.
We visited the Petronas Towers on our second night there, KL and indeed, Malaysia's most famous symbol and for good reason, the two huge towers are impressive, irrespective of your architectural knowledge or appreciation and at night they are quite a sight. Earlier that day we had been to the Batu cave, a few mile soutside of KL which was good, probably not for the right reasons though. The cave is the home of a big Hindu shrine and has a bit of a theme park atmosphere which tends to permeate any such site with people queing up for a small statue and rafts of stalls selling blessings and offering for the deitys. The cave is situated at the top of aroud 300 steps and there is a huge gold statue of some Hindu god (couldn't keep up) outside, on the stairs there are around 100 monkeys who entertain the tourists as they climb the stairs by mugging other tourista and generally monkeying around (couldn't think of anything better). Inside, the shrine was a tiny statue in the corner of a massive openig which had been conreted over and marked off, presumably for mass gatherings, and smelt or bat shit. I preferred the monkeys, the statue and the view of the entire city behind us.
We went to a theme park the next day, also a few miles outside of KL, which was advertised everywhere and apparently had a massive wave machine in a pool, sounded good. The day was a laugh in the end because the thrills we'd expected turned out to be pretty tame for a seasoned Alton Towers veteran; the water slides had speed bumps, the rides were basically variations on the swingin pirate ship job and the others were a sort of work in progress rollercoaster where part of it whizzes around a building site and the rest around the Wild West. There was also a turd in the pool and the wave machine only worked on the weekends, and Jen scraped her bum on the sandpaper landing of one of the slides. Still, good laugh.
When I think about it, we spent the majority of the time on Petaling Street which as I explained earlier, is a road of market stalls selling anything from ripped off purses (thouuusands of them) and Nike trainers to DVDs (even more of them) and T shirts. Wandering up and down the tightly packed street is failry exhausting as every single market stall holder talks to you like theyre your best mate who they haven't seen for ages, buying something is even more exhausting if a little more fun. Bags which have a price of RM400 can usually be bought for about RM60 if you're bold enough and the sellers constantly suggest new things as they follow you around, annoying to say the least.
The rest of the time in KL we sheltered from the daily 3PM downpur which emptied the streets of people and filled them with mini torrents of rainwater for a few hours.
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