Catching up again - Kuala Lumpur seems so long ago, though I guess it has been 6 weeks.
It was Buddha's birthday in the middle of May, which was nice of him as we got Friday off. We thought we'd make the most of the long weekend so took ourselves off to Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur to be precise. It's still almost a 4 hour flight from here so quite far for a weekend but we want to see lots of places while we're here!
We flew Malaysian Airlines and landed at lunchtime on Friday, went through immigration and jumped on the KLIA express into the city.
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| Model version of the train, should you not know what one looks like.... |
To get to our hotel you had to go through a shopping mall (standard asian practise) - I was pretty pleased to see Nandos! Stephen wouldn't let me go though, apparently we didn't come all the way to Malaysia to go to Nandos, pfft he gets to enjoy some tasty chicken when he goes back to London every few months for work!
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| Picture of Nandos, as clearly you wouldn't know what that looks like either. |
Now, the main reason for going to KL? The
PETRONAS TOWERS !! These towers are awesome - they totally dominate the KL skyline. They were the tallest building(s) in the world when I was at high school and partly inspired my engineering career, true fact. (The other part likely came from the fact I was good at maths and physics so it seemed like a good degree to do...). We didn't go up them, because well if you're up them then you can't see them! We did however stay in the Traders Hotel in a tower view room, the following photos taken from our room at various times of the day:
See, awesome towers!
Turns out there's not a great deal to do in KL apart from admire the towers. It's less like any other asian cities we've been to and more like Europe - wide streets you can walk down and less high rise I guess. After enjoying free cocktail (two) hours in the hotel we went out to find this place...
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| The Taps Beer Bar! |
We have a good knack of hunting down the best bars wherever we are in the world, this was no exception with a fab beer list. We were quite tired and feeling a bit lazy so just had dinner in here too - think I had pizza and Stephen burger and chips - not exactly embracing Malaysian cuisine.
The next morning we'd booked ourselves onto the top rated thing to do on Tripadvisor - A Malaysia Heritage Walk. The one we did was the most popular and called 'Eat Pray Love'. We turned up at 9:30 and got given these super cool caps and a bottle of water while we waited for the rest of the tour to turn up.
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| Malaysia truly asia..... |
The first stop on the tour was the cafe downstairs (turns out the walking tour didn't actually involve much walking, but lots of eating - win!).
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| Us eating breakfast #2 (the hotel rate included breakfast so it would have been rude to miss it!) |
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| Breakfast #2 consisted of a 'Pour Tea' - very sweet frothy tea, surprisingly tasty and a banana roti/pancake with curry dipping sauce - also very tasty! |
We were then shown around the older part of the city (most tourists don't venture out here and mainly stay in the newer shopping centre tastic part of town) and went to a chinese temple.
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| Older part of town |
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| Mucky river.. |
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| Mosque |
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| Typical street with the Kuala Lumpur Tower in the background. |
We went to places you wouldn't think to go unless somebody told you. That includes this 'banana leaf' restaurant... It's basically curries and rice, which you eat off a banana leaf, and with your fingers!
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| Sad face no food |
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| Happy face lots of food |
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| Jasmine bracelet all the girls got given before we went to the Hindu temple |
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| Sri Mahamariamman Temple |
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| Inside |
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| Ah, back on the food... this was in a backstreet market somewhere. |
I'd really recommend the tour to anyone going to KL, I can't remember all the things we ate / drank but we probably tried about 10 different things in total and definitely good value for 3-4 hours entertainment, I think we paid about £25 each.
After the tour we went back to the hotel to enjoy the air conditioning, we went to the pool before going to enjoy the free cocktails again. Stephen managed to drink 7 beers and myself 7 cocktails... value for money no?! After this not surprisingly we couldn't be bothered venturing too far for tea and ended up in an Italian just by the hotel. It was alright, but nothing special. I also forgot Malaysia is a muslim country - wondered why my pepperoni tasted weird, it was made from beef not pork, oops.
On Sunday we had a lazy day before flying back to Hong Kong, another succesful trip :-)
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| Shuttle from the hotel to the shopping centre - a whole 200m, really not necessary! |
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| Model planes in the airport |
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| Another pic of my favourite towers, just because :) |
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| Me & he + towers :) |
