Dan's Travel Log: Kuala Lumpur

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January 28, 2005

Kuala Lumpur | Jan 20-24 2005

This time round, I really didn’t want to have to get a return ticket, and fortunately enough, Malaysia Airlines was having a special – in that I could get a ticket to Phnom Penh for almost exactly half the price of a flight to Bangkok, Phnom Penh or Saigon. That made things much easier for me, as I don’t have to have a return ticket to fly into Phnom Penh, and it didn’t require any overland travel.

Also fortunate was that the stopover in Kuala Lumpur could be taken as a full stopover, not just a transit stop. So… I had a long weekend in Malaysia :)

Kuala Lumpur I found to be a very interesting place… I have gotten used to the under-developed side of Asia, so this city almost as developed as Sydney was strikingly different! (Relatively) Clean streets – nothing compared to what I’ve heard about Singapore, but compared to other parts of SE Asia… A great public transport system (built primarily around a weaving network of monorail and light-rail systems, trains and buses), large numbers of skyscrapers (including the famous Petronas Twin Towers – remember the towers and skybridge from ‘Entrapment’ with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones), yet still abundant in large areas of flora – parks, trees and gardens.

Even more interesting is the cultural mix of people – Malay, Chinese, Indian, etc… with a religious mix of almost everything (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian…) There is a noticeably strong influence (and possibly influx) from the Indian side of things, in the general population, landmarks and food selection… (I ate about 10 or more Roti Chanai over three days…. hehehe) The strength of the Indian influence is hugely stronger than in the areas of SE Asia I’d spent most time in.

The large Muslim population makes up for most of the architectural and cultural influence on the city. The Twin Towers have Muslim 8-sided star/circle based structural designs, which are similarly repeated in many places, including sidewalk concrete slab patterns. Another quite unexpected effect is that there are incredulously (considering the ‘western developed’ style of the place) so very few bars and nightclubs. Even in poorly developed Cambodia, bars and clubs TEEM the streets due to western demand. Yet I walked around almost the entire built-up section of KL, seeing barely a handful of bars, and nothing I would consider a nightclub. In addition to this, the price of alcohol is astounding! It’s even more expensive than Australia in many cases… wow! Apparently what many local expats do is go to some duty free island and bring back cases of their favourite beverage at a greatly reduced cost.

It was also comforting to be in a UK-English based country (Malaysia is part of the Commonwealth), driving on the left, hearing British accents instead of American, etc.

The shopping in KL is also spectacular… A dense city, filled with countless malls and shopping centres, 5, 6, 8 stories high, filled with every global and local brand-name clothing shop you could ever want, as well as electronics galore (yay for me :P), etc… Perhaps it was the malls that also comforted me. Ah yes, and also the ability to get ‘real’ lattes… They have many Starbucks shops, a few Gloria Jeans, as well as a few of their own, cheaper, and definitely worthy equivalent local chains, serving high quality espresso coffee.

In general, KL is definitely not as cheap as some of its other SE Asian neighbours, but in most ways its much cheaper than equivalent western cities – and still has most of the things provided by large western cities. My major costs were accommodation, airport transfers (35RM (about US$9) train each way), alcohol and shopping purchases :) So if you can minimise those things, you could have a very cheap, nice holiday there.

I went up to the skybridge in the Twin Towers (free, just have to wait in very long line very early in the morning), on the 41st floor. The high speed lift is quite impressive – 1 floor per second, meaning 41 seconds to the skybridge, or 80 something seconds to the top floor. One of my regular UNSW lifts would seemingly take 80 seconds just to get up 4 floors!

Yep, 41 floors up! and another 40 odd floors to go…

The view from the skybridge is quite vast and impressive. However, not as good as it would be from the top floor, but that is all office space inaccessible to the public. A better view would be from the top of the KL Tower, which I didn’t quite make it to (not free either).

KL City Centre Park