All aboard the Rollercoaster to Kuala Lumpur!

This morning we began our Kumuka tour, starting with a guided minibus tour of Singapore. It really stands out how organised this city is when you tour it. We were told many fantastic statistics about the place, most of which I can’t remember of course. But apparently the government of Singapore plan 40 years in advance, I can barely see 30 seconds into the future!! Singapore also has a 90 something percent rate of home ownership, one of the highest in the world, if not the highest. Singaporeans seem to have an answer or solution to every question, its just not fair!! Its not just the quantity of skyscrapers that takes your breath away. Hidden behind all these concrete monoliths are countless little parks and green spaces, which are immaculately maintained. Even Suntec shopping centre has a bonsai Japanese garden, and rooftop gardens with fountains flowing all over.

As evening drew in we grabbed our bags and loaded them on to a minivan. We were booked on to the overnight “express” train to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Due to the beautiful but strange immigration and Customs of Singapore and Malaysia, we cleared Malaysian customs at the train station deep in Singapore, and then cleared Singaporean customs at the first stop near the border. Malaysia owns the train station where we boarded the train, so, in theory we were in Malaysia!! So after clearing both sets of customs, our attention turned to our accommodation for the night, or should I say our rocking coffin!!! The brochure said “Sleep well and arrive refreshed to continue your journey”, what the brochure should have said was “why sleep, when you can enjoy a rollercoaster ride. But wait there’s more, this ride lasts 11 hours”.

We settled into our bunks, packed away our backpacks into the bunk beside us, closed our curtains and tried to settle down for the night. As the train trundled down the track at breakneck speeds of about 30 mph, but what felt like 200 mph, we realised it was going to be a long, long night. At the next stop all the bunks around us were filled up by a single family. Two teenage girls giggled, while others chomped away on Pringles or something equally noisy to eat.

Soon the girls retired to bed, the eating stopped, the empty Pringles box lay discarded, and peace settled over our little carriage…. Or maybe not!!

The rattling screeches of the wheels were accompanied by the whining throat action of a nearby snoring passenger. I can safely say that no one else on that train was able to get any proper sleep thanks to the motion of the train. But somehow by some miracle people who snore can always sleep like babies. It’s a strange phenomenon; it’s also a frustrating phenomenon.

At 3am, after broken sleep the train stopped in a station called Gemas. My imagination wondered and wandered beyond the dark and misty little station. What incredible things were here, what were the people like? But that’s the beauty and sadness of travel is that there is so much that we will never see, and never experience.

It’s an incredible feeling though, because you’re sharing the carriage with the locals, and they come and go, and talk in languages you don’t understand. They share food which looks and smells so different (apart from the Pringles of course!). They smile easily. The train trip even apart from the sleep deprivation provided one of the great experiences of travel.

So, after being picked up in a minivan (I love kumuka tours!!), we were dropped to the Swiss Inn in the Chinatown district of Kuala Lumpur (KL) at 7am. We headed straight to bed, and overslept and missed a late breakfast at 9am. Arriving dishevelled confused, and with eyes full of sleep we stumbled into the reception desk for our guided walk around KL with Paul Raj a local, and also our Kumuka Guide. He showed us the old railway station, with its proud history and beautiful, peaceful architecture. We wandered past some of the mosques around KL, on our way to the KLCC which is where the Petronas Towers are. They are an incredible sight, but at that stage of the day we were more interested in food. We went to a food court and enjoyed some Chicken Rice. Chicken rice rated as my favourite meal on the trip, and I forever searched for it as we travelled.

After an enjoyable lunch, we wandered through shortcuts that could only be known by a local. We tiptoed through hotel lobbies, scampered along the smart corridors of office blocks on the way to the KL Tower. The KL Tower a different lookout to the Petronas Towers is perched high on a hill, from where we could glimpse the complete cityscape of KL. The KL Tower provides excellent vistas to the mountains and hills on the periphery of the city. It proudly boasts that it is the 4th highest tower in Asia (think it was 4th!).

Our eyes and minds flooded and brimming with sights, sounds and tastes we eventually got back to the sweet pillows in our hotel room. We dreamt sweet dreams of the last 24 hours.

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