Malaysia – Twin towers and tea pots

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Kuala Lumpur

Much as we enjoyed the ‘back to nature’ thing that we had going on at the Perhentian islands, we arrived in the big smoke looking forward to hot showers, air conditioning and rooms without rats. All this and more can be found in KL. Of course, I’m sure there is only one thing on your mind, dear reader, when you think of Malaysia’s capital city, and that thing is:

Petronas
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Each day Petronas, aka the ‘big friendly (oil) giant’, gives away 1300 free passes to the bridge which joins the twin towers. The cheap skate back packer in me loved this but the jobless lay about in me was much less impressed at getting up at 6am, to queue for two hours before the ticket desk opened. Ugh. But hey, at least in a big city you can stand in line with a cappuccino and a chocolate waffle.

Well you know what they say about free lunches and apparently this is also true of bridge passes. Before we could crowd into the tourist lift we had to watch a cringe worthy promotional Petronas film. Building a better future for a technologically advanced, world leading, prosperous Malaysia, etc, etc. It was a lovely sentiment but reminiscent of the brain washing scene in A Clockwork Orange. Fortunately there was also an interactive section that was much more entertaining. Apparently the towers are 281 times higher than me!

The bridge is on the 42nd floor which is far from the highest point in the city but even through the sand in my eyes and a bit of drizzle it was a pretty cool experience. We dawdled away the rest of the morning wondering what they did with the top floors and looking through the mall that links the towers - which also contain a philharmonic concert hall!

But then like Roti for breakfast, the mall is something of a Malaysian specialty. To coin a well known slogan a brighter future for Malaysia might be priceless but for EVERYTHING else there’s MasterCard. The SOMETHING mall near our hostel even had a theme park in it, with rollercoaster!

Hoppety hop

The next day, courtesy of the (pretty dismal) KL hop-on hop-off bus we took in the national monument, the sculpture park (where everything represented Malaysia reaching towards a glorious future), China town, the national cultural centre (looks a bit like a turquoise Sydney Opera house), the gates of the royal palace and the bird park - home to the world’s largest walk in, in flight aviary. The park was alright but the quality of the enclosures was a bit mixed. We did see some lovely birds- although most of them thwarted our best attempts to take their picture!

Georgetown

Our next stop was a couple of days in Georgetown, on the island of Penang. Part of the city is a World Heritage site and has a mixture of old colonial buildings, mosques and Hindu temples. Map in hand, we set off early to avoid the scorching hot weather and did our own walking tour of the town centre- ducking into any shops that took our fancy to avoid the occasional downpours. We stumbled on a lovely tea shop where they explained to us how to prepare tea in the traditional way. I’m not sure my efforts were very traditional but it tasted pretty good!

For the rest of the time we decided to embrace the local culture and ate at outside markets and, of course, went to the mall.

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