Surprising Malaysia....
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2004
1
5
62
Trip End
Aug 31, 2007
Kuala lumpur and Keta island,
Malaysia
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
being in Singapore for five nights we realised that Malaysia was just few hours by bus from Singapore. We thought " why not spending a day in malaysia, more especially Kuala Lumpur to have few more stamps on our passports ;-). We finally decided to take a night train. it took us 8 hours and for 20 Euros we had beds and the journey was more than perfect.
7.00am : arrival at Kuala lumpur. As we are really well organised, we had our breakfast already freshly bought from a nice bakery in Singapore the day before. The first thing we always do when we dont have a guide book is look at the postcards... they usually show you the highlighths of the city or the country. We saw the Petronas tower, China town... and of course the wonderful beaches with white sand and clear blue water
A temple on Dirtyland
. Having travelling for about 2 weeks in very hot countries without being able to have a swim we more than wanted to go to one of those beaches. Well..lets find a map. THe inhabitants dont seem very happy to see tourists in their local train station and we feel like if we are not really welcome. Nightmare to get information we have been recommended to go to Keta island, the crab island which is really easy to find according to them and about one hour from Kuala Lumpur. All excited and tired we jumped for one more hour on the train going to the west of Kuala Lumpur.
Once at Port Klang...we thought it was a joke ! The smell started to kick us in the face and it was so hot we could hardly breath. We are thinking about going back. This place doesn't seem to be a touristic place at all. We managed to reach the little harbour to take the boat to go to the island but what we saw was absolutely disguting... rubbish everywhere, black birds and dogs eating on those bin beaches. The locals were looking at us as if they have never seen European people before. We found the boat but weren't sure if we should go in or not. Again no one to help us, they dont speak kEnglish or they dont want to. So we waited here in the sun with the smell for about 15 minutes to check out who was going to take this boat
Caro again
. Finally an old couple of Australian toursit went inside with their guide...we decided to follow them. After half an hour of sailing we thought that we will probably be nicely surprised about what we are going to see and that crab island is probably very nice and not like what we saw before.
Desillusion....it was even worse. When we arrived there we could not beleive what we were seeing. And the more we were getting into the island the worst it was becoming. Basically people were leaving in small houses but do not have bins so they throw away everything in the water and on the sea side. Am sure you can imagine after 10 or 15 years what can of damage this can do to a little piece of land like this island. Why was it called the crab .... just because it is so dirty that you have thousands of crabs when you arrived on the beach. You dont want to walk on it or they can eat you in half an hour :-0 !!!
We thought that we probably missed something and this island probably has one highlight point somewhere so we decided to ask to the guide of the Aussies. We litteraly said to us : "well....its famous because its dirty !!!" And then we are worried about recycling in Europe...we should start from here to educate people !
