After a thirteen hour flight I arrived at KL LCCT airport terminal. I then jumped on the Skybus, and a couple of LRT (trams/underground) and arrived at the Tune Hotel close to the Chow Kit/ Little India part of town (more about the Tune hotel KL in another post).
I was back in Kuala Lumpur for the first time in 11 years!
As I was pretty tired I did not venture out but had a few cups of tea in the downstairs lobby, managed to stay awake to about 8pm local time, then turned in and awoke at 1pm the next day. So much for an early start to sort out the jet lag straight away!
Now for those who have never been to SE Asia before let me tell you that it is a great entry city. It has all the charms of Asia but is not so in your face as cities such as Jakarta and Bangkok. Like most Asian cities it is breaming with life and there are lots of things that you need to look at a couple of times to confirm that they were what you thought they were. As can be expected for a city that has both one of the highest buildings and Towers in the world the city mixes the modern with the old; you do not need to wander far to find some ancient temple or mosque. Here are a few pics of the more prominent KL buildings.
Petronas Towers
The 421 metre high Menara KL tower
As mentioned above KL has many temples and mosques including this one , which is modelled on the one at Mecca.
One of the highlights of a trip to Kuala Lumpur has to be a visit to the markets. There is a permanent one at Petronas Street in China Town, and many that spring up throughout the city on certain days of the week such as the one at Little India (see a later post for pics of the Kuala Lumpur Indian Market). Malaysia does not seem to bother too much about the copyright laws and the market stalls have a large range of ‘genuine’ fakes; indeed the fakes are so authentic that you can actually choose them from the Rolex, Omega, whatever brochures!
KL Market watch catalogue
For some reason I have found it hard to get hold of a map in Kuala Lumpur, normally maps are easy to find and usually given away for free with loads of advertisements on them. I do have a map of the north of KL, which I printed out from google as it had the address of the hotel, but as for the south of the city, well that has been a bit of a mystery for me. This has meant that I have often wandered around aimlessly and got lost on many an occasion, always a fun thing to do as long as it is still light. Fortunately in KL there are lots of transport stations (LRT/Monorail) and you can always see either the Petronas or the Menara towers, so things aren’t that bad. One of the things I stumbled on when lost was this moped grave yard!
Where Scooters go to die
Just a note here for anyone following my travels, although I have a netbook with me and can write posts most days, I am not always connected to the internet. Therefore you may see 4 or 5 posts at once and then nothing for a week or two. If I have a few articles to post then I will set up wordpress to stagger them by a few hours.