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Published: August 7th 2007
Learning our lesson about reliable transport, we decided to carefully choose the bus company which we would travel with for 4 hours to Kuala Lumpur, or KL as the locals know it. We spent a couple of days questioning different travel agents, demanding to see pictures of buses, asking if it was direct and all the other things we have learned go wrong with bus travel and we wanted to make sure the 27 ringgits we were paying was worth it.
So on the day we were leaving, we chose the 11am bus, with a 10:30am pick up from the travel agent. We arrived at the travel agent, were told to sit and wait and at 10:50am we were lead 200m down the road and told to wait, the bus would be there in a couple of minutes to pick us up. We were soon joined by a couple of other passengers, the wait however, was not a couple of minutes...midday came and went and the bus still hadn't arrived (Neil by this point was debating whether he could get away with running over the road to McD's for another 9p ice cream!). Neil went and questioned the woman at
the travel agents, only for her to say it would be here in 10 minutes, but we were told it would leave at 11am! A fellow backpacker then chipped in and said he was told it would leave at 11:40am...we could tell at this point our journey (for all our planning and careful choosing) would not be as straightforward as we thought. We were relieved when, at 12:30pm the travel agent lady came, scrawled a number on our ticket, along with a new seat number and shoved the ticket back in our hands saying that the 11am had been cancelled. Finally at 12:40pm the bus arrived, to mini cheers from us. We all piled on the bus, the Malaysians (along with - the ever impatient at lateness - Donna) tut-tutting and head shaking. Excellent, we thought we will be in KL for 4:40pm, but this was not to be. We then drove to the 'proper' bus station which has been built in a place which is so inaccessible, we waited for 20 minutes for no-one to get on the bus. When we finally left, we thought excellent, we'll be in KL for 5pm!
The bus crossed the huge bridge
how many buttons?
a bit like the great glass elevator...except it wasn't great and it wasn't glass!connecting Penang to Butterworth (what a great name!) on the mainland, instead of heading towards the motorway - we saw the signposts for KL - the bus driver went in the opposite direction and we ended up waiting at Butterworth port for another 30 minutes, this was only after the bus driver had almost knocked a market stall over after mis-judging how much room he had to manoeuvre in. This wait however gave the bus company a chance to check our tickets, re-issue our tickets - twice - and check our tickets a further three times! Finally after 6 more passengers joined us we were on our way. In front of us was a mother and her 7 or 8 year old son, who was the fattest kid we had seen in a long time. Seriously the kid did not stop eating, he managed 2 corn on the cobs, a big packet of Rockets (the Asian brand of M&M's), a huge packet of crisps, half a litre of pop and his mum's sandwich, that was just in the first hour! Donna looked on in amazement that a kid could eat so much. Every time he grumbled about something, his mum
would miraculously pull out something else for him to eat to shut him up...unbelievable!...(think Augustus Gloop on speed!)
This bus we were on was the slowest bus ever...we don't seem to be having much luck with transport recently and were cursing our luck. We drove through some spectacular scenery, palm oil plantations and past volcanoes; we also drove through a huge storm which slowed the bus right down to about 10 mph as the driver couldn't see. All in all this journey was taking a LONG time. We stopped at some sort of restaurant four hours in...the Malaysians grumbled and shouted at the bus driver saying the bus was supposed to be direct, the bus driver didn't really care, he wanted a break so he stopped...for 45 minutes! We took this opportunity to buy some iced gems, excited that we could relive our iced gems feast in Khon Kaen, sadly this was not to be, they were disgusting and remarkably resembled the taste of plastic (not that we have ever eaten plastic but you know what we're saying)...anyway we digress...., so we had to be content with the traveller's essential emergency food...a tube of Pringles!
We finally arrived
in KL at 7pm, excited when we saw the Petronas Towers rising above the city. We were not so excited when the bus driver stopped, seemingly in a random place, said something in Malay and then got off. He then got back on the bus, aimed for Neil, Donna and the only other two Westerners on the bus and yelled abruptly 'where are you going?' at us...we replied “KL of course”, so then he demanded we get off the bus we were here, he said “we should have known!” So we shouted right on back at him saying it was rude and wrong to treat and speak to people the way he had and how were we meant to know we had to get off, he should be more understanding of tourists. After our ticking off, which the other two backpackers and a Malay man listened to with amusement the bus driver apologised...we were shocked, the first time in SE Asia that we have received an apology!
Not knowing where we were, we had to rely on the always wrong and maps are inaccurate Lonely Planet to get to the hostel we had booked. Surprisingly we found it without
getting lost, Donna even doing well to help with directions (her map reading skills are improving slightly, but they still aren't very good). We checked into our hostel and headed straight out for food as we had had nothing but Pringles and 'plasticy' (< is that a word?) iced gems to eat all day. Feeling refreshed, Donna followed her sixth sense and found a Top Shop right around the corner from the hostel. With a promise that she could go back the next day and look, we had a quick walk around the city.
We were drawn constantly to the Petronas Towers...they were the most spectacular buildings we have ever seen, so elegant and alien spaceship-like. We decided to walk to see them straight away. We liked KL as a city from the start, the people were quite different to those of Singapore, they had a lot of life and seemed to love to enjoy themselves. During our extensive walks around KL, we decided that this was a place we could live in, even though the drinking was very expensive.
The shopping though was fantastic...Zara, Top Shop, Top Man, MNG...everything we could need. We also soon discovered that
Suria KLCC shopping centre park
...yes there is a full park at this shopping centre! KL was good for electronics and after an evening of discussion we decided to hunt for a laptop the next day. We were up bright and early and after having our cornflakes for brekkie, we set off to the big electronics plazas to price things up. The salespeople in these plazas must have got fed up of seeing us as we walked round and round, asked lots of questions, haggled lots to get free stuff (you didn't expect anything less really did you?!) and finally, only 12 hours later we bought a brand, spanking new laptop which had only been released two days earlier and it was cheap. Happy and exhausted we retired back to the hostel and started to play as we had free wi-fi in the hostel, it's surprising how many places now do have wireless!
The next day we had a lot to pack in, clothes shopping and going up the Petronas Towers. Again we were up early, and went to the towers to queue for our free tickets to go to the Skybridge. We started to queue at 8:30am and got our tickets at 10am, which were to go up at 2pm. Very excited, we
went to the Suria KLCC shopping centre, which is built at the base of the towers to shop. We didn't buy much and had a good browse, we also managed to make it to Chinatown to have a look around before returning to the towers at 2pm.
The Petronas Towers are the headquarters of Petronas, Malaysia's national oil company. There was a museum at the towers which was interesting to look around which told facts about tall buildings and had videos of how the towers and skybridge were built. We also learnt how Petronas really seemed to invest in Malaysia and it's people. Not on a small scale like British Petroleum in the UK but on a much bigger funding scale...are ya reading this BP? Neil was a little disappointed that he missed the lightening demonstration as the principles are similar to MRI scanning, the towers having a Tesla cage built in and all that type of technical stuff...Anyway Neil was interested even if Donna was a little disinterested and bemused.
Again, as with Penang we found some very good Hainan chicken plastic chair restaurants. An interesting observation in SE Asia is that if a restaurant has plastic
chairs then it is usually a good sign of cheap and wholesome, tasty food. Again in KL this rule did not disappoint us. The people of KL are unusual as there is a real melting pot of different nationalities (e.g: Indian, Thai, Chinese, ethnic Malay, Indonesian etc). You can draw many similarities between KL and Singapore, however KL stands out a lot from Singapore because there is more things going on in the streets (e.g: hawkers, open bars, people walking etc) and the people seemed to have more life in them than the Singaporeans who dare we say at times were a little stuffy!
We rode the monorail from our guesthouse in an area called the Golden Triangle to KL Sentral station where we had heard that Air Asia was now running very cheap shuttle buses to its Budget terminal airport an hour away...for 9 Ringgit this was excellent value for money. Our flight was to take us onward to Vietnam but not before we had gone through the 'now' obligatory shuffling around of liquid items between our carry on and check-in luggage.
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Marco
non-member comment
Transportation Nightmare
Seems that you might need to have your transportation luck exorcised...i see a pattern here.