Kuala Lumpur, also known as KL, was next up on our itinerary. We arrived there in the afternoon of the 11th by bus from Cameron Highlands. It started pouring down with rain as soon as we started walking towards our hotel, so we sheltered and waited for it to die down before continuing. The hotel was a bit worn out but quite close to a metro and a monorail station and next to little India. After having really bad and cold Indian food for lunch we finally got our room, as it hadn't been ready when we arrived at 2 pm. KL clearly wanted to make a good first impression.
That evening we took the monorail to Bukit Bintang, the main shopping street in KL. It took us around 45 min to get from our hotel to Bukit Bintang, because a monorail pilar had sunk caused by a road tunnel construction further up the line. So the monorail wasn't as smooth a transportation as we had thought, though were are sure it's perfectly fine when fully functional. We spent that night mainly in a shopping centre called Pavilion and also had dinner there in a western restaurant (hamburgers yummy!). The shops don't close until ten o'clock in KL so there was plenty of time to wonder about the huge shopping mall.
The next day we went sightseeing. First we walked to the Central Market to see the hand crafts and local products sold there. Next to the Market there's the indepence square of Malaysia, Merdeka Square, which we also checked out. After that we started walking towards the Radio Tower but couldn't get all the way up there before hunger got to us and we had to stop for lunch. After lunch we couldn't be bothered to continue our journey to the Radio Tower any longer just because it was so unbearably hot, so we headed back to the hotel.
In the evening our friends Anna and Riku arrived to KL and we met them in our hotel. It was so nice to see friends from back home and to speak Finnish :D We all headed to the centre to see the Petronas Towers and then to eat on Jalan Petaling in Chinatown. We chose to eat at a small nightmarket off Petaling road. After that we had a couple of drinks (or a bucket of drinks for some of us) in a reggae bar and walked back to our hotel.
The next morning we took a metro to the Titiwangsa lake, where one could see a panoramic view of KL. Or that's what Lonely Planet told us. The truth was that the park was totally empty (it was sunday, a perfect day for a stroll in the park right??) and you couldn't see KL at all behind all the trees. We walked around the park for five minutes and then headed back to the metro station:D and all this in 35 degrees heat, not cool at all. Frustrated of the unnecessary trip to the lake we took a metro to one of the several shopping centres of KL in hope to brighten our sprits with some shopping. After all, KL is known to be a shopping paradise. It turned out that the shopping mall we chose to go to had 800 Malaysian shops and mostly Muslim clothes. Just our luck. Luckily they did have a food court where we could grab something to eat. After lunch we took the metro back to the centre for some well-deserved drinks. We didn't really look that closely which place we chose to have our drinks at and ended up paying a LOT for our ciders and beers. We also wondered around a shopping mall trying to find leather sandals for Rosanna, which off course turned out to be impossible since leather wasn't sold anywhere! You could say that we were a BIT annoyed how our day turned out be despite our best intentions. Well, there was nothing else to do than to just get back to our hotel and hope that our luck would change for the evening.
In the evening we headed again to Bukit Bintang, did some shopping and then walked to Jalan Alor for some food. We started out with some satay chicken and vegetables in sticks in a chinese stall. After that we had some dumplings and mango salad. Quite delicious!
As a desert we decided to finally try durian, the king of all fruits. It didn't quite live up to its name, it was disgusting! :D Especially the texture of the fruit is horrible, like raw eggs. Never again.
The rest of the evening we spent near Jalan Alor in the many bars it had to offer. The World Cup final was airing at 3 am that night so we had to stay awake until then. It was easier than we thought and soon enough it was time to take a taxi to Merdeka Square where a huge screen had been put up for the final. The square was filled with locals and no westerners :D After the first half time we gave up and walked back to our hotel and watched the rest of the match in the comfort of our rooms.
All-in-all the evening was quite a success compared to the day we had had earlier. The only downer was that Anna's shoe broke and she had to walk barefoot back to the hotel, ducking cockroaches:D
We had a flight the next morning to Sandakan in Borneo so we didn't get much sleep that night. Luckily our breakfast in the airport was the best we had had in a while, which cheered us up a bit :) We did like KL but three or two days felt like a long enough time to spend there.
+ 19.7.
We came back to KL from Sabah on the 19th to spend the day, before heading to the Perhentian Islands on a nightbus. We had time to visit the Batu Caves, which have a Hindu tempel situated inside them. The stairs leading to the caves have a modest 272 steps and are also overun by cheeky monkeys that look into your bag in hope of finding some fruits in there :D This caused a little bit of a hysteria among some chinese women...
In the evening we wondered about the Suria KLCC mall before heading to the bus station. There we were reunited with Anna and Riku who had arrived from Bali couple hours before and took a taxi straight to the bus station. An eight hour bus ride ahead of us we packed ourselves into the two-storage bus and tried to get some sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment