What was it about the sewer rats,
barbeque meat smells and aggressive handbag vendors that drew me back to Kuala Lumpur’s grimy Chinatown?
Maybe it was the unfinished
tourist attractions I missed during my first stay...or maybe to visit the
monkeys and Hindu shrines at the Batu Caves again...or maybe it was simply the cheapest return
ticket from Bali.
Whatever the case, we were in KL
- caught up on sleep, laundry and e-mails, so we headed towards the city center to
view the famous Petronas
Towers. The twin towers are 88-stories high and
headquarters to the national oil and gas company. We scored one of the 1,400 free daily tickets
and rode the elevator to the 41st floor skybridge connecting the two
towers at 170m above ground. A five
minute birds’ eye viewing (after a five hour wait) wasn’t complete without a
short patriotic film about oil and gas.
Our last tourist attraction in
the city was the KL Tower in the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve. The tower, also called Menara KL is a close
relative of Seattle’s
Space Needle. Its spherical summit is
inspired by a Malaysian spinning top and the Menara KL is the world’s fourth
largest telecommunication tower. We
bought tickets and rode the lift to the viewing deck (100m higher than the Petronas Towers’
skybridge) for a 360 degree view of Kuala
Lumpur. The
spinning top doubles as a revolving restaurant but we opted for Indian
cuisine at the base of the tower.
From the capital, we bussed two
hours south to the historical port town of Melaka.
A melting pot on the trade route between China
and India – Melaka was
formed with strong influences from neighboring Indonesia and aggressive pressure
from the Portuguese, Dutch and British.
One can still buy little wooden clogs in the Chinatown of Melaka today…
In a downpour, we checked into
the Sama-Sama Guest House, found a vegan café, rode a trishaw on a city tour and
ate banana roti before watching a couple movies in our drafty, unkempt
quarters. We woke in the middle of the
night to the piercing sound of Gongs from the nearby Sanduo Temple followed by endless chanting from a mosque down the street.
When morning arrived, it was time to escape the nightly street music and board a bus to Singapore.
