Kuala Lumpur

---

We arrived in Malaysia'a capital, Kuala Lumpur in the afternoon after a morning spent on the bus from Mallaca. It was hot and sticky and we spent quite a while walking around with our heavy bags until we found Chinatown which is the place we'd opted to stay. We checked into our hostel and hit the streets for an explore.

Chinatown has a real mix of cultures and does have it charms although it was grubby, smelt of sewage, many of the buildings were crumbling and the streets were very crowded. It was very different to the ultra-modern city we'd expected. However, the modern skyscrapers of the city centre loomed in the background reminding us where we were.

One of the streets in Chinatown is home to a huge market which has hundreds of stalls all selling fake designer clothes and pirated DVD's and at night it is swarming with people looking for a bargain. We had an explore but decided not to part with any cash that evening.

The following day we headed into the city centre on the subway in search of the slick metropolis we had envisioned. The first thing we did was to get our free tickets to go up the Petronas Towers as they only let a certain amount of people up per day. Our turn wasn't until the afternoon so we went for a walk around the city. We were a little disappointed. The streets were still pretty littered, there was a lot of building work going on and apart from the space-age, mega expensive designer malls selling Prada, Gucci and other unafordable brands the city didn't seem to be as 21st century as we'd imagined. We spent a lot of time walking around getting frustrated with the place and the heat not really seeing anything of interest. We took sanctuary in the malls with their lovely air conditioning and listened to the Christmas songs that were playing until it was time for our turn to go up the Petronas Towers.

The Towers are the only thing that really impressed us about the city. They are 451 meters tall and they used to be the tallest buildings in the world, a record which they have now lost but they remain the tallest twin towers. From the ground they are a truly impressive sight, they are unimaginably tall and it is pretty difficult to see the top of them without being some distance away from them. They are a real feat of engineering and we spent some time taking pictures from the ground before going inside to go up to the skybridge which connects the two towers.

The towers are the international headquarters for the oil company Petronas and before we went up to the skybridge we were forced to watch a shameless marketing video. It went on about how great Petronas is and how much they do for the world which we didn't believe for one second, their an oil company after all.

The skybridge was a bit of a disappointment, mainly because it had started to rain outside so the view wasn't great. We preferred the towers from the ground.

That night we went back to the 'fakes' market in Chinatown and after much walking around we bought Lil a fake Omega watch. Very classy. Afterwards we went up to the roof bar on the top of our hostel and took in the spectacular city scape by night. We think that Kuala Lumpur looks much better from above than at street level and the illuminated sky scrapers looked much more like the spacey vision we had in our minds before visiting.

The next day we waited ages in the disgusting bus station for our bus to our next stop, the peaceful Cameron Highlands.

---