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Published: January 11th 2010
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The Petronas Twin Towers
Some of the tallest buildings in the world - not my photo Days 37- 41: Kuala Lumpur
We spent five days in Kuala Lumpur, exploring the intriguing city and re-planning our future. The first day we went house-hunting and moved rooms to Chinatown, a more interesting neighborhood with nicer rooms. (Well, the first room we looked at in Chinatown actually featured a sheet with no less than thirty holes, but we didn’t stay there.) Our chosen room, a high-ceilinged, big windowed Soviet looking space was on the fourth floor of a solid old building, and felt like a haven above the city. Oddly, each floor was staffed by an elderly Chinese person, employed to sit in a chair and watch over the floor, like a concierge. Most of these employees were however, sleeping probably because they were all over 100 years old. Perhaps they were not paid but rather boarders that worked for their room? Ours was a beautiful room, with two giant beds each having clean, crisp, white sheets and a grand view of the bustling street below. A nice respite from the string of hovels we’d been staying in.
We walked through Chinatown, ablaze with pushy locals and tourists, shopping and eating. We checked out the Central Market Square, a very modern shopping plaza with modern art installations. We walked six miles across town to see the KL Towers, some of the tallest buildings in the world, walking through a ritzy club area we couldn’t afford, and a spacious, green park with a rubberized track. We were searching for an Arab food court we’d heart about, one that boasted falafel, something we were craving. We never found it, but after hours of looking, we did find two Lebanese restaurants, where choosing one, we enjoyed fresh falafel, hommus and shish taok. We watched many large Muslim families ushered in to private dining areas, surrounded by curtains. I believe these rooms were to allow the women the privacy to remove their burkhas, or at least face masks, while eating.
Afterwards, we were thrilled to discover the subway, and we happily took it six miles back to Chinatown.
The following day, while exploring Little India, we met a young British guy who told us there was big money to be made by travellers working in the mining towns in Western Australia. J had recently mentioned that he was running out of money and we had been trying to decide what to do. Working in Malaysia or Indonesia would likely make us only enough money to live in those countries and not to continue biking. But if we could go to a richer nearby country briefly, like Australia, we could work hard for a few months and save up enough money to continue biking. This British guy had just come back from cooking in a mining town where he had made $1000 a week. With nowhere to spend it, as the mining towns are isolated, he’d been able to save $10,000 in just a few months. This was the first we’d heard of the high demand for casual workers in Western Australia, and the idea started to bake in our brains.
We visited the National (History) Museum, a museum with too much pretty writing and not enough actual content or visual display. We learned very little about Malaysia and saw very little of interest there. The Planetarium was a much cooler museum, full of very interactive exhibits. We played with Jackie and Chuckie, two tiny monkeys who were supposedly trained to entertain people on the street. They seemed like wild monkeys though, as they were crazy, hyperactive and prone to biting people. People were supposed to watch the monkeys, be amused, and then give money to the monkeys owner. We had fun playing with those monkeys, but J left that street corner with a dozen monkey bites. I was more cautious.
We ate hommus, taboulleh and Lebanese bread at a rooftop bar while smoking fragrant tobacco shisha from a big pipe. We enjoyed the Olympics finals at a Jamaican reggae bar with expensive drinks, advertised outside for 1.60. Once you came inside you discovered that 1.60 was in GB pounds, not ringit. Tricky. We watched the men’s basketball finals on a huge TV set up outside very bougey restaurants in the rich, modern shopping district, at a bar where cocktails cost $7.
We spent two entire days researching Australian work visas and jobs available in their mining boom. According to the official website, we’d need to send a copy of our birth certificate, an onward plane ticket and proof we each had at least $5000 in our bank accounts to apply for the visa. We stressed out about these requirements, seeing as we didn’t have any of these things. But heading to Australia for a short while to make some money seemed like a great adventure in itself, plus a great way to secure funds for more travel. Not to mention I’d lived there before, loved it, and had been dying to go back. We decided we’d need to visit the Australian Embassy in town to satisfy our many questions.
We moved a third time, once our fascination for Chinatown was exhausted and we knew we‘d need to stay in town a few more days to decide what to do, to a new area of town, called Bukit Bintan. Our room here was really just a partitioned part of a giant room with walls that did not reach the ceiling. But the ceiling was about twenty feet high, our attached bathroom was bigger than our room, with brand new appliances, and we were within minutes of tons of great street food, shopping, and crowds of international people. The thirty-ish Pakistanis, Iranians and Indonesian men who ran the hotel were always hanging in the lobby and were fascinating to talk to, as I’d talked to few of their nationals in my life. The Iranian said he was from “Persia”, which I later found out was because he was embarrassed to be from Iran, being a secular Muslim now living in a tolerant Muslim country. I told him I was sometimes embarrassed to be from America but that people you meet should understand that you, personally, cannot be held responsible for all of the decisions made in your country.
When we went to the embassy, they couldn’t really answer any of our questions, as they weren’t familiar with the regulations for Americans going to Australia, only the regulations for Malaysians going to Australia. They actually told us it wasn’t possible to get a work holiday visa for Australia, as this wasn’t yet an option for Malaysians, and they couldn’t seem to understand that the rules would be different for Americans. We were frustrated, unsure what to do, unsure if we would be able to apply.
So what did we do? We completed the online application anyway, and to our great relief, were not required to submit any of those documents. We were informed that those documents could be asked for if they Australian government needed them, but they were not required for our initial submission. We were stoked! We would hear if we received the visas in anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. In the meantime, we decided we’d continue biking south, towards Singapore. If we got the visas, we’d fly from there to Australia. If we didn’t get them, we’d be in Singapore, and we’d make a new plan.
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tanhb
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KL Skyline
The 1st photo posted is actually not KL skyline but Singapore