World Adventure

Hi All,

It was really hard to decide where to stay in Kuala Lumpur as most cheap accommodation options that we found had terrible reviews. We spent hours and eventually decided on the China town Inn hotel (79Malaysia Ringgits) on Petaling st in the heart of Chinatown. It was a bit of journey from the low cost carrier airport and not too clear exactly where to catch the bus at the airport. Eventually we found it and paid our 8 Malaysia Ringgits(AUD 3) each and settled in for our 1hr trip to Kuala Lumpur sentral (central) railway station. The weather which had been  fine became a dark and stormy afternoon  with lightning, thunder and rain then in a matter of minutes it was gone. Such is the nature of the tropics.

Once there we had to catch the rather busy KL skytrain one stop. Not a problem as we have been on public transport squeezes many times before. The doors on the skytrain tried to eat my pack much to the amusement of the locals so I had to push a little harder to make room. Then it was a matter of getting to the hotel. Should have been a quick walk but poor signage allowed us to walk straight past the street in a horrid tourist market with stupid stall holders asking in earnest questions such as 'would you like a massage?' or 'would you like a new bag?' or 'come and eat in our restuarant?'. I would reply, 'what the bloody hell would I want with a .... can't you see that we have our big pack on and are preoccupied?'.  A couple of tourists kindly pointed us back to the Petaling st turn off which meant having to pass through the market again with the same stupid questions....We managed to see the hotel sign above the market chaos and It was a relief to find that the hotel was quite nice when we arrived. We later looked at one of the backpacker options we were considering and confirmed, as we had read, our suspicions that it was not good and we had made the right choice to pay a little extra.

It was a struggle to find cheap  and decent looking food in the area as it caters to tourists but we eventually found some cheap food at the Reggae bar a street away. They gave us a western menu but we knew there were cheaper asian dishes available and soon found that there was a separate asian menu. The meal was tasty but we knew that  we could find better.Hunger won this time but next time we would widen our search and hopefully find better

Next day.

Petronus towers. Formerly the tallest building in the world. Loney Planet recommended getting to the ticket counter before 8am to snap a couple of the 1600 daily free tickets to visit the sky bridge on floor 41 of the 88 floor building. We got there at 745am and found that there was a queue of over 180 people who obviously knew better than us. Maybe they had come the previous morning only to discover like  us a huge crowd and returned the following morning.town We had to wait until 9am for the ticket office to open and the queue to start moving. The early time slots were gone by the time we got tickets and the next slot was 2pm in the afternoon so took it. Quite inconvenient as we were in no man´s land.

We wandered around the shops for a while and watched some of avatar on, a 50 inch samsung led screen, the sharpest display I have ever seen before heading to Malaysian tourism for some ideas. It was a good choice as we found out there was a cultural event being held at 3 pm. The time was drifting by so we headed to a supermarket and grabbed half a cooked chicken for lunch before heading up to the reception area of the petronus towers. This has a very very cool tesla coil that simulates lightning strikes on a model of the petronus towers. I was wondering how Malaysia could afford to build such a new city centre and found out that petronus is an oil company and all became clear.

The towers each have a base shape of an islamic 8 pointed star which is so symbolic of the Muslim religion.

 The lift was impressive as it moved one floor per second and was smooth. Vanessa and I got to the viewing area linking the two towers and were....well...underwhelmed. Is this rational? We just waited for 6hr for a trip up and elevator to the middle of the petronus towers for a view for 15 minutes before heading back down.Well that is a tick in the tourist check-list anyway.

We got down and raced to the Malaysian tourism centre for the cultural event which cost us 5Malaysia Ringgits(AUD 1.75) each! It turned out to be a very entertaining and professional performance with a medium group of traditional dancers performing dance from various regions of Malaysia. The indian, persian and chinese influence is so clear in the dance yet it is still distinctively malaysian in style. There was so much energy in the dancing and the girls brought along their classic SE asian smiles. Near the end of the performance a borneo blow pipe and dart was brought out and 4 of the dancers held yellow balloons. There was a group of nigerian defence force visitors and 3 were selected as well as me. The first two hit their targets with impressive blows then it was my turn. I had a mental image of the dart coming out slowly and just fallling out the end of the blow pipe onto the floor just in front of me or even worse killing one of the dancers. I took a big breath, placed my mouth at the end of the blow pipe and aimed with the help of one of the dancers, blew and saw the pop of the yellow balloon. Phew. No international incident. I walked back to the seat and got a congratulatatorial pat from one of the nigerians.The third nigerian hit his target as well as the other. They did not hesitate; they were naturals.

Next day.

Kuala Lumpur Aviary. Largest walk in aviary the world. I love these qualifying titles. Reminds me of claims such as tallest man, tallest man on platform shoes, stilts, standing on a rubber ball etc. Anyway it was a hot and sweaty walk from the hotel to the park about 1km way. I think it was about 35 deg C and 90 percent humidity so we might as well have been swimming up a river to get to the park. Still it gave us the chance to admire the jungle along the way and the scale of the trees. The entrance fee was a  little hefty at 42 Malaysia Ringgits but we decided to visit anyway. It wasn't quite what we expected as many of the birds were in cages but it was still an impressive aviary to visit and the Rhinosorus Hornbill was the star for me. There were a lot of peacocks prancing around the area with their feather in a classic display.Aparently it is mating season for them so they were out to impress although most were missing a few feathers. Perhaps there was some link between the Indian visitors holding peacock feathers and those missing. Who knows?

Butterfly park. Just down the road was the butterfly park and we were hoping to spot some larger varieties of butterfly. It was oppressively humid in the enclosure but the 6000 plus butterflies seemed to enjoy it and the garden setting was lovely . The butterflies were not as large as we hope but the live insect display was impressive. Our favourite was the stick and leaf insect enclosure with at least 20 insects pretending to be plants parts. The scale of the creatures from the jungle was large and maybe this has given us some insight into what the creepy crawlies of Borneo will be like.

We went back to the room to cool down and dry off for a while and didn't turn out again until the evening. We headed to the central market for a meal upstairs in the food court. Much better than the previous nights food and then went outside for another cultural performance which was free. Unfortunately this was not of the same quality that we had seen the previous day but we stayed to watch to make up the crowd numbers.

Next day.

Batu Caves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batu_Caves

This is an enormous cave, about 13km from Kuala Lumpur, filled with Hindu statues and shrines. A pretty easy trip on the public bus 11 for 2.50 baht each.Talked with a clearly overeducated bus conductor who was in between jobs after having worked in the hotel industry for 10 year. Batu cave is impossible to miss once you get off the bus as there is a giant gold statue next to the 272 steps on a steep incline leading up to caves.

There were so many monkeys around the area and they were being fed by the Hindu visitors. Sometimes the thieving monkeys stole unguarded devotees lunches and shared the spoils with the rest of the family or scaled up onto a cliff ledge for a bit of privacy. Everywhere we looked there was activity in the trees above us with groups of monkeys coming down to the cave floor or just playing around with daredevil antics. Well worth the visit.

We have been having some trouble with our camera batteries failing and are not sure whether it is a combination of the charger and batteries. So we have purchased a new fast charger which came with some 2700mA AA batteries.It was overpriced but I was sick of looking at chargers so we purchased. Hopefully this will solve the problem as we are heading to Borneo tomorrow and would hate to miss taking an image of our long lost red hair relatives due to battery problems.

Borneo has been on our plan for a long time so we have decided to give it priority over mainland Malaysia which will have to wait for another couple of weeks.

Can you believe that we have less than 2 months left in our adventure?

Bye,
David and Vanessa