Advertisement
Published: September 19th 2009
Kuala Lumpur and the Rainforest by May After our last blog about the tropical paradise beach, you all are probably wishing you were in SE Asia too. Before you get too jealous and before you buy your plane ticket, read on: because there is a not so fun side to all this.
Landing in Kuala Lumpur From Tioman Island we rode a 3 hour ferry ride and about a 4 hour bus ride across Malaysia to its capital, Kuala Lumpur (KL). The bus didn’t drop us off where we thought it was going to (the bus station), so we were a little confused when we got off with all our bags on a busy KL street with no street signs. Paul walked around a bit and studied the map and thought he knew which way to go and he was right. We were heading to our little hotel in Chinatown and we started asking the way to Chinatown and people were very helpful, but it was a 20 minute walk or so.
Our Various Ailments Our hotel was nice and good. After dinner though, Paul was leaning over to wash his hands and pulled his back. He had
carried Ella’s and his bag all day because Ella had an infection on her back (another story) that itched like crazy and we thought her pack would irritate it.
We woke up the next morning and Paul had bed bug bites all over. A pulled back and bed bugs. Not good. That first morning, I took Ella to the nearby hospital for someone to look at her back. This was her second trip to an emergency room in Malaysia; the first was in Malacca for another infection. This time we got antihistamines for the itch and antibiotic for the infection. It was a good experience- very nice, English speaking staff and a good place to wait- but kind of a bummer we had to go at all.
Getting Around in KL After we got Ella taken care of, Paul and I switched rooms to get away from the bed bugs Then we headed out into the city. KL is a big, chaotic, Asian city. Sidewalks are broken and pot holed. Streets are huge and full of traffic and difficult to cross. Crosswalks don’t necessarily tell you when to cross and so it’s kind of scary. There are many
underpasses and overpasses across highways that crisscross the city but you have to look for them and walk out of your way in the heat, noise and smog to get to them.
An example of KL walking conditions We could see the Islamic Art Museum from our hotel, it wasn’t far as the crow flies, but unfortunately we aren’t crows. The friendly guys at the desk told Paul directions to walk and he even wrote them down but it still was very confusing. Here’s what we did:
• crossed a street
• walked past a construction zone beside a highway, past busses spitting out their fumes
• crossed another bigger street- 4 lanes, no stop light in sight
• walked to our left past some abandoned trailers from trucks next to another construction site
• walked up stairs to an overpass
• crossed the overpass that was to train tracks, took a right on the overpass and then a left and down to a car garage
• we came out on the top level of an empty car garage and walked down to the basement where there was supposedly an entrance to an
underpass. The entrance was locked
• we walked back up to the street level of the car garage and went through the garage looking for someone to ask- a guard was there who knew enough English to point us out of the garage and to the left
• we left the garage and looked left and there was a super highway and an entrance to an underpass
• we walked through the underpass and came out on the back side of the National Mosque
• we walked through the grounds of the National Mosque, past a playground and a dumpster, up some stairs and down a ramp to a parking lot
• we walked through the parking lot and across the street was the Art Museum.
• What a walk!!
• The art museum was very good and interesting, though.
Feeling Better We did do some fun things in KL and Ella’s rash got increasingly better and Paul’s back felt better and we didn’t get new bites from our beds, so all in all it was a pretty good place to visit.
We saw a 10 story mall with a small
amusement park (incl. roller coaster) in the back of it on floors 5-10. We went to a bird park that was a huge area enclosed by a net. The nets went up to the tree tops, so beautiful birds could just fly around in the net. The girls got to feed parrots from their hands. We visited another mall in the ground stories of the Petronus Towers, the former world’s tallest building. It was a great mall with a wonderful food court and a Science Museum that was fun and not crowded. Outside of the mall was a big park with a splashing area for kids and the biggest playground we’ve ever seen.
Leaving KL for the Rainforest We stayed in KL 5 nights and 4 days and then we left for Taman Negara, which is Malaysia’s largest national park. The park contains the world’s oldest rainforest, 130 million years old. Never been cut or hit by an ice age or volcanic activity. We thought we should visit it.
We left at 8am and arrived at the little town across a river from the park entrance around 4pm. We had ridden a bus, waited, ridden another bus and
Canopy Walkway High
It may not look too high, but we are waaaaay up. It was a bit scary.then ridden a long, big, dug out canoe with a motor up river for a couple of hours.
Our Hardest Afternoon Yet We got out of the canoe onto a floating restaurant. We had to find a place to stay. Leaving the floating restaurant involved crossing a 8 foot plank bridge to the shore, walking across a rocky beach and then up a dirt/sand/trash track up a steep hill to the town with all our packs on.
The town consisted of several guest houses, a school and some mini marts. The place we ended up staying the first night was a fairly long walk up hills and down to hot little shacks with holes in the walls and floors and giant snails and bugs in the bathroom. We didn’t like it too much.
Paul’s back hurt by the time we got there so he laid down and I took the girls out to find food. We walked around the little town, spotting several restaurants which were all closed due to Ramadan. We did find a nicer hotel to stay in- AC, less “wild”, closer to town that we would move into the next morning. It started to
Crazy Sidewalks
People rode their motorcycles down the sidewalks, because the roads were gridlock. get dark and I knew our way back wasn’t lit, so I bought a little flashlight and we headed down to the river to check out the floating restaurants. All were closed, but one, which was packed with tourists and had a line. We kept walking to the place we had unloaded and it was closed but opening soon so we just sat and waited for it to open. It was 7:45 and had been a long day. The food was decent and our walk back was OK, due to the flashlight. It was really loud, with insect sounds, sounded like NC in the summer.
Canopy Walkway with a fever So the next morning we moved rooms. We unpacked went back to our floating restaurant for lunch and then took a little motorized canoe across the river to the rainforest. We decided to hike to the canopy walkway. It was a bit over a mile walk and we took it slow, looked at things, snapped photos and walked on a very nice path. We all liked it, it was big and green and the trees were buttressed with vines hanging all down them. We saw a small lizard, a
KL Monorail
One of the ways to get around downtown small snake and a very big, bright red centipede.
Half of the canopy walkway was open so we paid a bit of money and headed up it. It was aluminum ladders, strung together and covered with plywood, resting in a net like hammock that provided your hand rails. It felt pretty safe, even for me, who doesn’t like heights. It was really, really high, though - way up in the trees and shaky.
Ella didn’t like it at all. She felt really dizzy and she and I just walked quickly but carefully to the end. Paul and Jordan came slower to look around and take pictures. We then hiked back out and Ella was really not feeling well by then, so when we finally got back to the hotel, I took her temperature and it was 102!
So, we stayed one more day, just to let Ella rest. Jordan also started having tummy trouble. Only our one floating restaurant was open for meals. We were in bad shape. Roughing it is not for us we decided. You won’t find us too far off the beaten track.
Back to Singapore We left the next morning. Paul’s back
still hurt, Ella had a fever and sore throat and Jordan felt yucky. We rode from 8am-8pm on a bus/train combination to make it back to our beloved Singapore.
Now we’re all feeling better with some lessons learned after our first month—transitions to new places are stressful and should be minimized and we like to be where there’s some comforts of home. We’re rethinking our itinerary with these lessons in mind, we’ll let you know what we decide when we decide it.
A few comments from Paul Asia is hard. May’s narration captures well our time in Kuala Lumpur and Taman Negara, which wasn’t great. It wasn’t bad, but I think it was harder even than she makes it sound. First, when she says KL was a big chaotic Asian city, it really was. It’s funny, because in some ways it was as modern as Singapore - huge fancy malls, sleek new monorails running through downtown, yuppies of all stripes (Malay, South Indian, Chinese).. But in other ways, it’s overwhelmingly urban Asia - crazy immovable traffic, perilous and horrifying street crossings through the thick traffic, smog and fumes everywhere, terrifying heat, broken concrete sidewalks and construction hammering,
trash, beggars with open sores looking at you beseechingly, strong unidentifiable smells that jump out and grab you and make you queasy, lots of odd-looking and odder-smelling food that you’ve never seen and can’t identify and can’t imagine eating. It all just gets to be too much sometimes, especially for the younger folks. You have to go out in all of that, and wade through it, and sit down and eat your dinner in those weirdo restaurants…. It becomes the air that you have to breathe, and that makes it hard.
Arriving is hard. It’s also hard, as May suggests, to arrive in a new place. Kuala Lumpur is actually a pretty interesting place, because it’s developing so fast and there is so much cultural diversity (Malay, Indian, Chinese). But when we arrive in a place, it often seems pretty hellish for the first 24 hours or so. It’s new and overwhelming, and you don’t know where anything is, and everything you see and hear sort of assaults your senses and bludgeons you with its difference from home and weirdness. Both girls tend to have 24 hours of culture shock in a new place, and it’s no fun for
them. Then we all got used to KL, and we sort of liked it. It’s not great - not as good as Singapore or Melacca or Tioman, all of which were superb in their own way - but it was good enough.
Not-so-great places are hard. The village at the rainforest park (Taman Negara) simply wasn’t that good of a place, even to me and May. It wasn’t the arrival; here it was just the place. It was a very rural village, pretty much set up for tourists. But it wasn’t really set up well for tourists, or it was the down season. Most of the places to stay were like jungle camping, complete with extreme heat and very very large insects and snails. We did find a good place, with AC and creature-less showers, and that saved us. But all the restaurants were floating restaurants on the river, and the girls felt seasick every time we ate. And none of them were really open, because it’s Ramadan and it’s not really the high season there. So you could never be sure you were going to be able to find food. And the whole place just kind of felt
a bit run-down, and trash-filled, and too-far-from-home. We had culture shock at the beginning, and then never really got used to that place, because it was just hard. The rainforest was good, but Ella and Jordan were too out of it to do much but stay in our AC hotel room and read and listen to books-on-CD on the computer.
Traveling is hard. The other hard thing is that we’ve been moving so much. We’ve had 4-5 all-day (12-14 hours) bus / boat / train trips in the past few weeks. Malaysian trains, buses, and boats are actually pretty nice, but it’s still hard to be moving through space that much. It just wears you out. It’s not much fun. We’ve realized that we need to move less often to preserve our energy.
Getting sick is hard. Ella had something wrong with her the whole 3-4 weeks we were in Malaysia. Two bad (hospital-worthy bad) skin infections and one 103 degree fever sickness that turned her whole mouth into one big cold sore so that she can’t eat. That just makes it hard, even in the good places. Jordan felt bad in the rainforest village too.
All of this is not to complain…. We’re still having fun, and we’re still glad we’ve come, and we’re still looking forward to the rest of the trip. It’s silly to complain about being together, and being in all of these fabulously interesting places, for such a long time. But there is a part of our traveling that is quite hard, more like hard work than actually working. We’ll restructure things to make it easier, more livable, and more fun. We’ve learned a lot by doing what we’ve been doing, and we’ll make some changes based on what we’ve learned.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.333s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 15; qc: 66; dbt: 0.1405s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Nana
non-member comment
You look like you are having fun in the pictures. I guess good and not so good adventures are experiences you will remember and laugh about later. Thanks for sharing the not so good. I am glad everyone is feeling better. Love to all, Nana