Day 258 - Small biggest buildings

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So it’s St. Patrick’s Day and the Irish have got even more excuses than usual to get drunk - their new status as one of cricket’s top sides and Darryl’s stag weekend. Little sign of it here in Kuala Lumpur though - it’s a Muslim country and so much so even our hostel is alcohol-free. We were up early and went to the Petronas Towers, the ex-tallest buildings in the world, but when we saw the size of the queue we decided it would be best to return the following morning even earlier. Our advice would be to get there at about 8am.

Gemma’s map reading led us on an unnecessarily long circuit before we caught a train to Merdeka Square, KL’s main square and Malaysia’s main flag pole. We went to the National History Museum on the edge of the square which was extremely good before going shopping in the Central Market. This used to be where everyone did their shopping but now it mostly caters to the tourists. Having been a fan of the Petronas Towers since even before building commenced, Ed couldn’t resist buying a model of them (and obviously a model of the world's ex-tallest building is pretty big...), which then meant a couple of hours spent posting them home. Sally, expect them in 1 to 3 months they reckoned.

Then we went to KL Sentral Station to buy train tickets for our next journey, to Thailand, before walking around Chinatown. This is all centred around Petaling St and there are loads of stalls selling counterfeit goods. Something must have been going on because all of a sudden every single stall owner started packing away their dodgy gear in between intense use of walkie-talkies. We never worked out exactly what had happened, but we did see a couple of police vans full of freshly arrested people.

We walked to the KL Tower which is the world’s 4th tallest communication tower and which for obvious reasons was built on a hill. This meant it was quite a walk up to the top through a ‘city’ jungle-like path, and we arrived at the tower’s entrance dripping with sweat to see busloads of people stepping off their air-conditioned buses. Not annoying at all. We wanted to go up the tower at night so we’d just come along to buy tickets a couple of hours earlier, so next was a visit to the Hard Rock Café because we just fancied some western food. We took a taxi back up to the KL Tower from quite a weird taxi driver. He confirmed his weirdness when we tried to pay and he refused our money, just giving us a lift for free. Malaysian taxi drivers are unlike those found anywhere else. The tower itself was well worth visiting, although Kuala Lumpur probably isn’t quite as spectacular a skyline as some of the others we’ve visited recently (Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore). You do however get a great view of the Petronas Towers (well one of them from this angle) and it’s worth the visit just for that. It also made us want to go up those towers all the more…

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