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Published: December 31st 2011
We had been planning our Christmas trip away for a few months, unlike our usual last minute preparations because one of our old uni friends from the UK, Dave, was coming to visit us.
We set off for Singapore on a 7am flight with a full day of travelling ahead of us. Our source of amusement for the majority of the 3 and a half hour flight was the announcement that it was one of the cabin crew’s birthday…the laughter from us wasn’t because it was her birthday but because her name was 'Pringles'. We had an interesting discussion as to what her middle name might be – sour cream and barbeque were the main contenders.
Singapore to Kuala Lumpur We breezed through the Swiss clock that is Changi airport, Dave was there waiting to meet us with a few kilos of Cadbury’s and Galaxy chocolate bars for us, and after devouring a McDonalds at the airport (we know, we know!) we hopped in a taxi to Woodlands station (S$26 or £13). We sat for a while catching up with Dave before we boarded the train. Again, the Immigration procedure for exiting Singapore was smooth - this must
be our record for the least amount of time spent in a country…a total of two hours! Entering Malaysia was done in the same building and, for the first time in our travels, we had to have our finger prints taken by an electronic scanner…before you say anything, this was not because we are dodgy or anything but because it’s a new Malaysian Immigration requirement for everyone entering the country. Apparently, the Malay government started the policy on a holiday weekend earlier this year and it caused chaos at the border and airports with 6 hour tailbacks at the road border! More impressive for us was the fact that such biometric data recording was a thing of science fiction only when we left the UK five years ago...how things have changed.
The train was a long 6 and a half hours; we chose the train as Dave (trainspotter?) particularly wanted to do a train journey as part of this trip, rather than the bus. When we saw the train, we thought it looked quite old, but according to the signs inside the carriages it was only built in 1996 (not sure what they had been doing to it to
Exhausted after the walk up!
Neil was feeling under the weather with strep throat.cause it to age that much). The scenery out of the window was nice, although it was very worrying to see so many palm oil plantations where rainforest should be – this is something we are quite passionate about as it’s due to the palm oil plantations that orang-utans are endangered. We arrived a little late into Kuala Lumpur Sentral station at 8:45pm and headed, via the monorail, to our hostel in Bukit Bintang. We quickly checked in and headed out to the nearby ‘food street’. Jalan Alor has back-to-back restaurants, we had never eaten on the road at night before and we ended up choosing a Thai restaurant; Donna’s meal was ok, Neil and Dave’s meals had battered chicken (yuk to the batter), which we have never experienced before in a Thai restaurant so it was a little disappointing. By this point, it was late so after a little McDonalds ice cream detour – we just can’t resist ice cream, we headed off to bed for an early-ish start for some shopping the next day. We did notice that tourist numbers seem to be well down for this time of year in KL and our hostel had fewer than
5 guests when it normally would be fully booked. A sign of the global slowdown maybe?
Kuala Lumpur, electronics and haggling down The next morning dawned dull and rainy…typical, we think Dave had brought UK weather with him, as for the majority of time we were in KL it rained and was really dull! As we would only have two full days in KL, we had planned a jam packed schedule with several touristy things we had never managed to get around to doing. After having some breakfast at the hostel, we managed to spend a lot of our first day in Low Yat Plaza, which is a shopping centre for electronics of all kinds. We managed to get a good deal on a new smarter-than-us phone and Dave got a good deal on a camera – we have to say the prices in KL for electronics are excellent because there is no duty/tax and the exchange rate against the UK pound seems to be more stable than other currencies in the region. It was at this point in the day we realised that Neil’s bank card had been blocked…grrr!
After we had exhausted the electronics shopping
we headed for the Petronas Towers to try and get some pictures at night. Unfortunately the rain kind of scuppered those plans! We headed inside Suria shopping centre at the base of the towers and grabbed some liquorice allsorts (for Donna which are surprisingly hard to find in Asia) and hoped that the rain would ease off. We weren’t in luck, it was still raining when it was time to leave and the clouds were actually covering the top of the towers so we just called it a night and went to the Chinatown Petaling Street night market. Donna was on the hunt for a handbag…she just couldn’t resist all those pretties and found a genuine fake Chanel bag which Neil relentlessly haggled for – so relentlessly Dave said he actually felt a little bit sorry for the vendor and casually walked away in embarassment. We then spent a wonderful hour on skype shouting at our bank in the UK about Neil’s card being blocked!
Bad luck getting to the Batu Caves We had a jam packed touristy day planned for our second day in KL, we wanted to show Dave as many sights of the city as
The outside of Pavillion shopping centre, KL
There was a bear for each country of the world and they were painted by an artist of that country possible. So we planned to cram in the Batu Caves, Menara KL Tower and the Petronas Towers at night (again). We had a simple breakfast of toast and tea at the hostel…we think we have mentioned before that we just can’t describe how good proper hot toast made from non-sweet bread, with butter and strawberry jam is – usually in Asia toast is cold and rock hard as if it’s been toasted and then left out for 2 days! We caught the monorail to Sentral station and bought our train tickets for the Batu Caves – a bargain at RM1 (20p!), the lady at the ticket desk told us to run as the train was about to leave…so we ran and sure enough, when we were half way down the stairs, there was the train pulling away from the platform. This was definitely a day for bad luck where transport was concerned. The information board on the platform said there was another train in 30 minutes, so we waited and waited and waited…it didn’t turn up. At this point Dave went to the toilet and within a couple of minutes of him being gone, the train turned up and left.
We then had to wait almost 30 minutes for the next train…we made sure we didn’t miss the next one and were on our way after waiting around for about an hour and a half!
The Batu Caves were pretty impressive. They are a series of caves and temples inside a limestone hill around 13km away from KL centre. The Caves are one of the most popular Hindu shrines outside India and has the world’s tallest statue of Murugan (a Hindu deity). We had to walk up 272 steps to get to the main Cathedral Cave – all the way dodging mischievous monkeys. We hate, hate, hate monkeys…yes they may look cute but they are little buggers when it comes to stealing things and jumping on people. We just saw an article on BBC how they can use ipads now to communicate with each other so you get what we mean when we say...clever and cunning. We gave them a really wide berth, all the pictures we took of them were from a safe distance with the zoom on the camera. At the top we only went inside of the main Cathedral Cave, which had a Hindu temple inside.
There is another cave called the Dark Cave, which, surprisingly, looked dark inside but the Malay government restricts access to this, so you have to pay for entrance. Being the stingy travellers we are, we didn’t pay. Besides, it smelt of bat shit so the way our luck was going that day we would probably have had bats shit on our heads. Oh crap...you may have noticed that our obsession with poo in these blogs is rearing it's ugly head again?
Menara communications tower to get 'the' panaromic view of KL We had a little more luck on our way back to KL – we only had to wait 30 minutes for the train, going back was RM2 (40p), at this point it was about 2.40pm (after all the train troubles it had put us a little behind) and we were hungry so we got some Hainan chicken rice for lunch. We were really disappointed when we first planned this time in KL to learn that the Petronas Towers would be closed for renovations, so we made the decision to go to the Menara KL Tower to go up to the Observation Deck to view the city. The
KL Tower is the 7th tallest communications tower in the world at 421m high. The tickets you buy for the Observation Deck only takes you as high as 276m, the lift reached it in about 30 seconds and you could feel your ears popping on the way up! The views were pretty spectacular…really, really impressive as you can see from the above panorama. We were given audio guides each with rubbish headphones, they didn’t work very well so we ended up giving up on them and just admired the view and took loads of pictures. The handy thing was, in front of each main viewpoint window was a little map (like a Google earth type of map) with the main locations marked so we knew what we were looking at. Also dotted around were peep show type binoculars. Dave had serious Zoom envy as they were really powerful and you could see people swimming in pools etc from miles away.
After the Observation Deck we went to the F1 experience, which is basically a computer simulation of the F1 track at Sepang. It was ok (a bit like a fancy Xbox), all it seemed to prove is that if
Donna ever had to drive again (after a 5 year break from it), she would be pretty rubbish at it! We had better luck that day with the weather and it wasn’t raining so we walked back to the Petronas Towers, had some food at the Suria shopping centre food court (Indian and Teppanyaki!) and waited for it to get dark. It was very atmospheric when we were outside taking pictures, the clouds had cleared and as we were taking videos the call to prayer started echoing around the park at the bottom of the towers.
Rounding up... Our time in KL had sadly come to an end. This is a city which we love, it’s an amazing blend of East and West. It had been around 18 months since we were last there and we had noticed a couple of changes, the traffic seemed a lot worse and the public transport seemed to be a lot more crowded. On the night we went to Chinatown we had to wait for 4 monorail trains to come and go before we managed to squeeze on one. Although more efficient than some cities, the public transport in KL definitely needs
some re-investment before it becomes unusable. The other thing we noticed and got quite excited about was the Christmas trees and decorations everywhere, the shopping centres seemed to go all out with their decorations and they were rather classy to, we just couldn’t resist taking pictures. Our enthusiasm for picture taking and the excitement over a Christmas tree and giant candy canes drew Dave to the conclusion we have been in Asia a little too long!
Our next stop was somewhere we have never been before, only briefly passed through on a bus/minibus – we had heard really good things about the town, especially about the food market and night market!
The pictures for this entry go onto 2 pages - just click the next button to see the second page!
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Good to see you blogging again
Sorry you missed the train. I would say Pringle\'s parents were old hippies but I\'m not sure when those chips came about. What kind of camera did you decide on? Can\'t wait to read more. Happy travels.