Malaisia

September 9th and 10th 2011

Thailand was the end of the road for us in Asia, with a layover in Germany to visit our good friends Kate and Jay (and Merril). At least that was the tentative plan. Delta had different plans for us. Unfortunately our return ticket via Beijing China was unchangeable, unrefundable, unbelievable. Sadly, with this news we gave up on seeing our friends and were unexpectedly presented with two full weeks of where to spend that time. We could extend our time in Thailand which we loved. Alas, they only have a 30 day Visa on arrival if flying (land crossing only allow 15 days). This necessitated us leaving the country, if we wanted to get back in. We thought, trip of a lifetime, maybe we should add a place to our list that wasn’t originally on it. Instead we added three new countries to wrap up our tour of Asia.
Our first destination, a city, that for most Americans (myself included) have only a vague awareness of and would be hard pressed to pinpoint it on a map. Kuala Lumpur is the capital of Malaysia a country that is divided into two sections, peninsular Malaysia just under Thailand and Borneo, an Island to the east. Its history is very interesting as in addition to its indigenous people, the Malay, there are also large groups of Chinese and Indians who moved (were brought) here during the English Colonial period. We were intrigued enough by this unique blend (and the really cheap tickets on Air Asia) to book tickets to see it for ourselves. Even better, as my dad secured us a stay at the 5 star Hilton Kuala Lumpur, we were going to be sleeping in luxury for our two night stay.
In our opinion, a really heavily skewed one due to the brevity of our trip, a traveler should not bother with KL unless in transit. We arrived to very gray sky which we learned were not due to a rain front, but from the burning of huge tracts of land in parts of Indonesia. The low cloud cover trapped in the heat and made you feel like you were in a sauna. The city, buildings, sidewalks, etc, also had a run down feel to them. We were told there were areas that were shiny and new, but we did not see them. In fact, the feel of the city made us feel, for the first time in our travels, unsafe.
We did venture out to visit Chinatown and the square where Malaysian Independence was declared. The latter was a small, but pretty collection of colonial buildings that surrounded a square with a large flag pole, supposedly the largest in the world. Chinatown was a series of streets that looked and felt like much of the other Chinatowns we had visited, but more expensive. We did have a chance encounter, an example of the connectedness of the world, where we ran into the visiting instructor at the Koh Tao Dive Shop (and crashed his bike bringing it to end). He was cutting through the main thoroughfare of China town and spotted us eyeing the various merchandise.




There were some highlights from our visit specific to KL. The Hilton is located right next to an area called Brookfields which in addition to a lot of blind masseuse, are a number of really good Indian restaurants. We settled on one called “The Gem” and it provided not one, but two incredible dinners for us during our stay. The highlights included mango lassies, chicken tikka masala and a mutton dish called rogan josh. We also enjoyed the close proximity of Kuala Lumpur Sentral, the train station. Practically, it provided easy access to and from Malaysia. As a bonus it had a great assortment of shops and restaurants and provided my first fix of a green tea latte since Shanghai. In the end, the hotel saved our trip to Kuala Lumpur (Thanks again Dad!). Since we were uninspired but our wanderings around the city, we decided to take advantage of our 5 star accommodation and live like the other half. For us, this included using the pool grotto, snuggling in our feather bed to watch movies, ordering room service and soaking in a giant bubble bath. Kuala Lumpur wasn’t so bad after all.

We decided to take one more train trip from KLL to our second to last destination. Fittingly, when we went to book our tickets there were only upright seats left for the overnight voyage. So with fear in our hearts we booked the tickets. Surprisingly, this trip was still more comfortable than both our China sleeper train and bus voyage in Vietnam* and got us safely to our next destination…SINGAPORE.