Time to move on from Melaka, and onto the big city in Malaysia – Kuala Lumpur. Our hostel was in the Chinatown district, so after a 90 minute bus north we hopped on a busy local bus to get there. We then discovered one of the things that KL is famous for – traffic. And lots of it. We were stuck for quite a while on the same road. On a crowded bus with minimal air-con. Which is not fun with a 22kg backpack strapped to your back.
Chinatown itself is a bustling area, full of shops selling real goods for cheap prices. Laugh laugh. Fakes galore! It’s a great place if, like me, you really don’t care about the name attached to your clothes. Bartering is always good fun as well. One shirt, one pair of shoes, one pair of shades, one scarf, one belt, and a lot of people telling me to go away for demanding unreasonable prices.
As it had been almost two hours, Jason was hungry, so we dived into a local shop for Chinese food. And a coconut to drink, naturally. The weather, contrary to everywhere previous on this trip, was stunning. Hot, sunny, and pretty clear. This forced our hand a bit, so we decided to knock out the major tourist attractions that afternoon and evening.
After negotiating the metro system (not the easiest task), we proceeded up the KL tower. Apparently it’s the fifth tallest building in the world. It does seem rather large, but doesn’t significantly stick out of the skyline the way superscrapers do in other cities, such as the CN Tower in Toronto. This is because KL is home to numerous rather tall buildings. The reason we went up the KL tower was to get a good view of the famous ones – the Petronas Towers.
These are the tallest twin towers in the world. I don’t know if that is post-2001, but I don’t remember the World Trade Centre towers ever having a bridge connecting them. The bridge is at the 42nd floor, which we thought makes it rather pointless as an attraction. Instead, we stayed up the KL tower for sunset (which didn’t really happen, damn clouds ruining our fun again), and then walked over to see the illuminated towers from the base. It is a pretty impressive sight.
We then ate something called bat kut teh. No, I couldn’t pronounce it properly either. Jason had been raving about this, so was particularly excited. To people in Korea reading this – think kam ja tang, but it’s belly meat on the bone, not meat from the spine. To other people – meat on the bone in a soup. Good stuff. Ate too many chillies though.
Our hostel had a bar at ground level, so we explored that. For about 10 minutes. It was eerily similar to a bar/club we went to a fair bit in uni called Queen of Hearts (or Tarts, whatever you prefer). Partly this was because everybody seemed very young. In that most of them looked a fair bit younger than 18. Feeling like old men, we called it quits. We had another busy day lined up for the Saturday.
Love you all
Matt
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