If you hadn’t guessed already, this is my first post-Lanka blog post from Malaysia (another ‘m’!). We left Colombo early on Monday morning. Cousin Sophie’s flight was due into KL international a few hours after ours so I stuck around whilst the others went to the hostel. KL arrivals hall has an interactive world map to watch all incoming flights in real-time, pretty awesome. Made a very last minute ‘PRICE’ sign and watched as Love Actually-like scenes unfolded as families and friends reunited.
Wahoo! This has been a long time coming but we’re finally off on our travels. Got a bus to KL central and walked to the hostel. Aircon, wifi, a chillout area and free breakfast for a fiver a night?! Hello. K.L. is super modern. The buses, trains and monorail all have aircon and most stations have wifi. It was noticeably clean too and felt much more city-like than Colombo. We got the monorail to the Petronas Towers to see them lit up like chandeliers at night.
We’d heard that it was best to climb the Menara tower as the observation deck was higher than the bridge on the towers and you can instead see the towers from there.
In the morning we got the train to the Batu Caves, an ancient set of caves and Hindu temple. The caves themselves were absolutely huge. At the foot of the steps there is the largest standing statue of the Hindu god, Murugan.
Got the monorail (awesome and of course air conditioned) to Chinatown for lunch. Still getting to grips with Malaysian food but have had Mee Goreng, a noodle dish derived from Chinese cuisine and Curry Mee (spicy curry noodle soup with coconut milk, veg, chilli, tofu or meat).
In the evening we went up Menara towers, recommended for a better view than the Petronas towers (and it turns out tickets for the twin towers were sold out anyway). Was a pretty amazing 360° view. Felt much more real than looking down from the empire statw building. We could see Petronas towers, china town and the Baru caves and watched the sunset.
Sophie and I went to K.L. Bird Park the following morning. Have never seen so many peacocks in my life! Even more than on safari in Sri Lanka. Saw one perform it’s mating ritual with feathers up and shaking, wow! It was a free-flying bird canopy so you could get extremely close to the birds. Saw many other species, am over peacocks now though!
Went to Melaka for one night, an interesting city in the south. Can’t say I recommend the river boat cruise… and the whole place was a big mismatch of tourist-tacky/wanna-be-cultural. May have just got a bad impression, the riverside itself was nice for a drink though!
Then onto the Cameron Highlands and Penang, second post to follow before Bangkok!
Jess in Sri Lanka & Beyond 