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Published: February 5th 2010
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Our flight to KL was great, no complaints regarding the food or service, except I did manage to snap my ipod headphone jack and our day-pack ripped! I guess there will always be things going wrong here and there on a trip like this... Once we'd finished in customs and all that boring stuff, we trekked outside to find a bland and rainy sky along with some humidity, a billion desperate taxis and people everywhere! Air Asia have their own airport in KL which is a little bit special, it's called the KL low cost carrier terminal (LCCT) and is the central hub for most of Air Asia's international as well as domestic flights.
We eventually found our pre-booked skybus and were led onto the bus by friendly bus boys with umbrellas. The bus trip to KL Sentral train station took about 60 minutes, it was a really comfortable coach bus. Using our hostel info print-out, we guided ourselves to the KL Sentral monorail station across the road and made our way to Chow Kit station. We hopped off and followed the directions further (with a few misjudgements along the way), eventually we found our hostel and were shown our
room. It was pretty good, for little under $20 AUD per night we had our own double room with air-con, fan, door lock, free breakfast and in-room wi-fi... Not bad!
After freshening up in the shared bathroom we ventured out into the streets with empty bellies. We searched around the local area of the hostel and walked through a few markets containing street stall food, fruit & veg plus other various random crap that you just don't want to buy at all! I was feeling pretty uncomfortable there as I felt many of the men at the stalls were speaking about us and laughing. They were sitting on top of their bench tops and it was a pretty disgusting place I will be honest, not hygenic at all. There were even rats running around! We didn't want to eat any of it for fear of being sick the next day. We were still hungry, so eventually after passing a large mosque we found some restaurants which had views of Petronas Towers in the distance. We tried our best to order something sensible that we knew we’d like. No such luck. Our meals were not great at all, just poor
quality, bad flavour and there was also no alcohol for sale! After this escapade, it didn't take long to work out that our hostel was located in a poor Muslim area. We had to get out of there, so we took a taxi for 5 MYR ($1.50) to the Petronas towers and spent an hour or so gazing and snapping away. We also visited the prestigious shopping centre inside. We then went to a bar called Rum Jungle which was pretty cool, except they only serve Carlsberg beer and all the drinks were expensive, same prices as home! We decided to catch a cab back to the hostel after a few drinks and Brent finding a stash of cash on the bathroom floor. The markets were still thriving outside our hostel so we decided to get a quick foot massage, they were a friendly little family, and although they didn't speak much English we were still all able to communicate with smiles and few words.
Our second day in KL was quite adventurous; attempting to find the Indian consulate to obtain our tourist visa, using an address and map that didn't match. Long story cut short, we just didn't
make it in time that day and wasted quite a few hours. We also visited the Malaysia National Museum and it was great to learn about the history and independence of their country. That afternoon we finally found the bustling hub of the city and spent hours exploring the colourful streets of Bukit Bintang, full of buskers, food stalls, restaurants, reflexology massage parlours, shopping centres and cafes ooozing the scent of strawberry shisha smoke.
The next morning it was my birthday and we went for a nice breakfast before heading out AGAIN to find the Indian consulate to get this bloody visa situation sorted! We decided to get the hop-on-hop-off tour bus which goes through the city including Little India where the consulate was located. It's also dirt cheap. Of course, now that we'd found the office we'd spent 2 days looking for, it was closed on the 14th January due to a public holiday in India. Just our luck. Fortunately, there was a man behind the desk and after much begging, he agreed to take our applications and we would have to come back after 5-7 working days. Looks like we would be seeing more of KL... We
headed to Little India to check out the markets around the corner. They are quite firm on their prices and there isn't much room for bartering with the sales people. There are also many gold jewellery dealers and dodgy electronics stores in this area. We continued with the bus tour and saw the National Palace, a few museums and some other landmarks.
That evening we headed back to Bukit Bintang to have a meal at 'Hawker's Row' one street full of food stalls including Malay, Chinese, Thai and Hong Kong cuisine. We had some delicious satay sticks (our fave), cashew nut chicken and Brent unfortunately chose a rather foul noodle dish, Mee goreng, was a bit fishy so it went to waste. We walked further down the Bintang walk and came to a massive shopping centre called the Pavilion. It was full of lavish designer stores and had a beautiful waterfall and Chinese lantern display at the entrance. We found a cafe nearby and took advantage of the happy hour specials and also ordered shisha, a large fancy water pipe used to smoke delicious fruit flavoured tobacco, we tried strawberry flavour. Once our bellies were so bloated from all
the cheap beer, we went for a massage which was really nice, apart from the loud snoring in the next room! I had originally thought it was Brent so I told him to shut up, but the massage ladies laughed and told me it was another customer. Sorry Brent!
The next morning we still had a few hours left to use our bus tour ticket, which was valid for 24 hours. We visited China Town and we wished that we had done this sooner as it was brilliant! In our opinion it was alot better than Little India, much more colourful and better markets with a bigger range for shopping and food. The main things they want to sell you in China Town include fake handbags (namely Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Prada), Tag watches, sunnies and t-shirts. All is fake of course, but mind you there are some good fakes to be found! We were asked by one store, if we would like to preview the special collection. We were taken to a small air-conditioned ‘showroom’ which had many great looking leather designer bags, we were told these were all authentic, however the seller did not own a licence,
so he was not able to legally sell them. I could sense some dishonesty and have read stories in Cosmo about this. These fakes were the best of the best, the ones which customs ask you for your receipt at the airport and when you have nothing to show, you face massive fines. Stuff that! We quickly fled the store, explaining we simply couldn’t afford to fork out 900 Ringgit ($300 AUD) for these beauties. Tooooooo expensive!! “Good price for me = good price for you” is NOT always the case.
We headed back towards the ‘Golden Triangle’ of KL and found another nice shopping centre which had a theme park and IMAX cinema inside. We watched the massive indoor rollercoaster a few times and then had some dinner at a pizza place called Papa John’s, then we watched Avatar at the IMAX.
When we got back to our hostel we packed our bags to prepare for our flight to Singapore the next morning. We were ready to battle a brand new city and were definitely looking forward to a little bit of luxury in stylish Singapore!
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