KL: don't trust the trains
Trip Start
Nov 13, 2006
1
52
71
Trip End
May 13, 2007
Seremban,
Malaysia
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Once the train had eventually arrived (around 20 minutes late), it started to trudge its way out of Kuala Lumpur. After a few stations, we found that the bell which sounded whenever the doors were open was continuing to sound even when the doors were shut. The driver edged forward and tried opening and closing the doors again to see if this fixed it. It didn't, so he tried the same trick a number of times before coming to our carriage and giving the door a sound kicking to try to make it close properly. It didn't. Eventually, he discovered a battery that had become lodged in the tracks that the doors close along and was stopping them closing fully (if you ever want to delay a train and flummox the driver you now know how...). Having removed this, we made our way to the next station where we had to transfer to another train (either the battery wasn't the only problem or they weren't convinced they had fixed it properly). We followed the crowd as we couldn't understand any of the announcements, slightly nervous that we may end up on a train going back the way we came. Thankfully, we eventually made our way to the right train station and caught a taxi to the wrong place. Luckily, where the taxi driver dropped us was just up some steps from where we needed to be, so we walked down the steps and into the cultural centre, which we found was closed for renovation. Thankfully, the sultan's buildings outside, which were the main reason for coming, were still open so we went to take some pictures of both the outside and inside of these. We then headed back into town, catching a taxi which also took us to the wrong place: I asked for one place, the taxi driver looked confused so I changed where we were going and pointed to a church on the map (thinking that a cross sign on the map may be pretty universal). The taxi driver fished out his reading glasses, looked at the map and nodded. He then took us to the wrong church. Thankfully, we could walk from where we were dropped to our original destinations: the State Secretariat building and Istana building, stopping along the way only to buy some drinks, which included the rather bizarrely coloured Pepsi Gold.
The next day, we decided to risk the trains again and go to Cyberjaya and Putrajaya - the federal administrative capital of Malaysia. We caught the fast train to destined for the airport (which was much faster than the one the previous day) and got off at the correct stop before walking down to the bus station and asking for the bus to Putrajaya. The helpful chap at the bus station said we wanted to get the bus 'over there' and then clarified himself by shouting 'E1 E1". I assumed he meant we had to get the E1 bus, which we did. Two or three minutes after it set off we figured out that this bus was heading back to KL, and the chap in the bus station must have heard me say 'centre of Putrajaya' and just caught the 'centre' bit, thinking we were heading to KL Sentral bus station. Either that or he did it on purpose to wind up some dumb tourists. Once we got back to the bus station, rather than try again we decided to leave it and walked solemnly back to the hostel for our last night.
