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Published: October 10th 2007
Delays courtesy of Air Asia, and then covering the inconvenient 70km distance between the airport and the centre of town, saw us arriving at our guesthouse in Kuala Lumpur in the wee small hours. My spirits had briefly been raised by seeing the illuminated grandeur of the Petronas Towers as we sped through the city streets, but check-in at our hostel revealed that they'd given our room to someone else, an administrative cock-up that was going to mean we'd have to change rooms the following day (we'd phoned earlier in the day specifically to remind them we were coming late).
Since LA Woman had already seen the sights in KL, I was up early on my own the next day to attempt to visit the Skybridge. This is the viewing platform that joins the Petronas Towers, though is rather disappointingly only a third of the way up. Tickets go on sale at 8:30AM and I'd thought that turning up at 8AM should ensure me a good place in the queue, however the first Saturday after the Merdeka celebrations maybe wasn't the best time to go as the ticket-selling area was already crowded. Even by 9AM there was no discernible shortening
of the queue so, since I'm a very reluctant queuer and also wasn't dead set on seeing the view from the Skybridge, I abandoned the idea and took a stroll around the outside of the towers instead. Though close up they were an uninspiring glass and metal design, the scale of them was awesome and the tops of the towers resembled the spires on a temple. At night, being so brightly lit that the low cloud glowed around their upper reaches in a ghostly nimbus, they drew the eye to them whenever you glimpsed them through the other puny skyscrapers around the city.
The KL Tower, a similarly-sized but Spaceneedle-thin construction nearby, suffered by comparison.
For some reason, perhaps due to its proximity to Indonesia, I'd thought that Malaysia was a fairly populous country and that KL would be something like the chaotic sprawl of Bangkok but with a dash of the modernity of Singapore. I was thus surprised to read that the country has less than half the population of the UK and a mere 2 million citizens reside in the capital. Certainly public trasnport in KL was a delight to use, with a cheap, regular, clean,
and speedy rail system through parts of the city. We visited a number of sights including Merdeka Square and the National Mosque, passing assorted colonial buildings along the way.
That constituted our 1 day visit to KL. The following morning we were up at 3:20AM and Indonesia-bound.
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