Unexpected stay in Kuala Lumpur

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After breakfast we were approached by a gentleman in the lobby of our hotel who wanted us to hire his taxi for the day to show us the sights of KL. We had been wondering the cheapest way to get from where we were into KL city. The staff at the hotel were very friendly but spoke only a little English...so not much help there. The taxi drivers price seemed very reasonable and although we were a bit hesitant we agreed. It turned out to be a really good decision. The taxi driver was a friendly Indian guy who was a wealth of information and really eager to show us his city and explain a bit about the culture. Even though we had only hired him for the morning to do a standard tour we ended up using his taxi for the entire day.

The Petronas Towers were a marvel of modern technology and I am positive we couldn't afford the price of a cup of coffee let alone anything else. Our friendly taxi driver showed us some of the older parts of KL. For a capital city the CBD was surprisingly small and very quiet.

In the afternoon we hired our taxi driver to take us to the Batu Caves. I had read on trip advisor this was a must see place. It was not disappointing. It was hard to miss with its big golden statue out the front and heaps of people around. Apparently there are tens of thousands of people during holy pilgrimages but there were only a couple of hundred the day we were there. It is quite a climb to the top with heaps of stairs and the pilgrims do it without shoes. There were probably as many monkeys as there were stairs. Because the tourists and pilgrims feed them they are quite aggressive and are best avoided. Stephen was brave and had his photo taken standing beside a couple. The interior of the cave was being renovated when we visited but was still very interesting.

We had a great meal at one of the little local restaurants outside the cave although our taxi driver had to order for us as the entire menu was in hindi and no one in the restaurant spoke English. The meal was extremely tasty, certainly better then the food we had had in India. Dinner was had at the hotel and we packed in anticipation of our flight to Vientiane in the morning.

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Photos

Photo 1
Petronas Towers

Photo 2
Batu Caves