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Published: February 19th 2009
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Scott and I are travelling with friends this trip. They all spent two weeks in the Philippines while I worked and I met up with them in KL on the 12th of Jan.
I arrived in KL on the 11th on an airasia flight from Australia. The seats were, as expected, tiny which wasn’t much of an issue as I had an entire row to myself. Once my bag finally appeared on the baggage carousel (why does my bag always seem to be the last one out?) at the LCCT airport I caught the 9RM bus to KL Sentral train station which took about an hour. From there I caught the monorail to the same hotel Scott and I stayed at in KL last time.
The next day I revisited the Petronas towers, KLCC, BB Plaza, Sungei Wang etc before catching the bus back to LCCT where I met up with the gang.
We boarded our flight to Jakarta a few hours later. Following the safety demonstration the air hostess told us to “take a few moments and pray together for a safe arrival”…hmm not particularly reassuring! Luckily we made it to Jakarta safely and paid 25USD for
a visa 30 day visa each before heading to immigration. The other four must look very suspicious as they were all interrogated by the immigration official as to who they were travelling with and what they were doing while my guy barely said a word. Andrew’s immigration official was particularly professional and told him that he looked like Peter Parker from Spiderman...which is a bit of a stretch.
We ended up hiring a van to take us to the dreaded Jln Jaksa - the only ‘real’ backpacker area in Jakarta. I had done a fair bit of reading up and had asked quite a few people what they thought of Jakarta in general and particularly Jln Jaksa as everything I had read made it sound absolutely disgusting. I think sometimes it’s good to come in with very low expectations as it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. We headed straight for Hotel Margot on the recommendation of another travelblogger but they wouldn’t let us have three people stay in one room so it was going to work out very expensive so we headed off in search of somewhere else. The first place we looked at was very dodgy.
We asked if they had any rooms available and the guy hesitated for a while and then said uh yeah…and showed us one room which wasn’t entirely repulsive…until you looked into the bathroom. When we asked to see the other room he hesitated again and said uh hang on a while. We are all certain he was running off to kick whoever was paying for the room by the hour out so that we could have a look at it. Needless to say we decided against that hotel. The next one we tried was newly opened (1st of Jan this year) and although it was relatively pricey (250000 rupiah for a double room) they were willing to allow us to have three people in one room. The rooms were really nice and the bathrooms were more than respectable so we decided to cut our losses as we figured even if this one did rent by the hour it can’t have been used too often if it was that new!
The following morning we headed straight to the train station to book tickets to Bandung on the 1.30pm train. After securing our tickets we walked around a little and then
decided it was far too hot and that there wasn’t much to see so retreated back to the air conditioning in our hotel.
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