Kuala Lumpur

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Désolée, cet article est encore en anglais ! Je suis fatiguée et c'est difficile pour moi d'écrire français correctement : toutes les activités et les endroits que nous visitons sont en anglais dans ma tête !

We arrived in Kuala Lumpur and easily found a tourist bus to take us to our accommodation near Petaling Street, in Chinatown. We had chosen to get a private room in a hostel but as a double bedroom was too expensive, we got a bunk bed! The hostel isn't very nice but it is quite clean. It was 4pm and, as we hadn't had a proper breakfast nor lunch, we were quite hungry so we went to a Food Hall. We couldn't understand most of the food names so we opted for a fairly safe chicken fried rice. We took a walk to the Sultan Abdul Samal building, had a stroll in Central Market and went back to our hostel. We had dinner in a tiny place in Chinatown where neither of us liked the food. I did not even eat mine as it was so spicy it was torture!! I noticed that many Malaysian "restaurants" and street food places were not halal which means that no Muslim eat there. I find it quite surprising considering that more than 60% of the Malaysian population practices Islam!
After a good night's sleep, we took the free Go KL bus to Menara KL (Kuala Lumpur Tower) and had a walk in the KL Forest Eco park, a dense forest in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. We hadn't seen the signs warning us of the dangerous species of snakes, spiders and centipedes before coming in so we enjoyed our walk in spite of the heat!
After that, we headed to the Pavilion, a huge 8 floors shopping centre, for some burgers (!).
Kuala Lumpur looks like a lot of Western cities, busy and expanding quickly. The transport around the city is very good, with a free and efficient bus service but the traffic seemed pretty bad no matter what time of the day it was. There are a lot of skyscrapers, shopping malls for the wealthiest, lots of billboards and huge screens with ads... The city seems to be pretty clean although we've seen parts that weren't so good (especially the part we stayed in, some places smell horrible!). There doesn't seem to be many homeless people, nor strays.
We had dinner at the Pavilion, but this time we headed to the 1st floor (where people who can't afford the upper floors eat!) and ate at the Food Republic, a place with lots of food kiosks. We couldn't decide where to eat as we didn't understand half of the food on the menus so we opted for Thai food (we know all about it now!) which wasn't very nice... We then went to the Petronas towers to see the Lake Symphony show.
On the next day, we got woken up late by some hostel staff who offered to move us to a private double room. We did some shopping in Chinatown, where I tried to find the lady who sold me a pair of sandals the day before as the sandals broke after a few hours of wearing them!
We then took the bus to the Pavilion to have lunch there again!
On our way back to the hostel, we went to Central Market, where we finally found the lady who sold me my shoes. She sewed my shoe back on while we were drinking a delicious shake. After that, we found the longest route possible to our accommodation (no, we didn't get lost!!). Chinatown is a bit of a maze and all the streets look alike!
After a quick rest, we headed to KH tower, a helipad tower, for a great sunset viewpoint!
We had to buy expensive drinks to be allowed on the helipad, 35 floors above the ground. It turned out not to be such a great viewpoint for sunset as a big tower was hiding the sun! It was very busy on the helipad (which I'm not sure is ever used as a helipad!).
We headed back to the Pavilion to get our first Malaysian meal from one of the Food republic kiosks before getting back to our accommodation. Tomorrow, we're going to Tanam Negara, which is a minimum 6 hours journey away!

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