KL, Malaysia

If you use the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘inspirational’ to describe an Asian city - I'd probably say you were on crack, but the heart of KL comes as close as it gets to living up to those words of high praise. Kuala Lumpur was a drastic change from Jakarta, and seeing both in the same day certainly makes KL the winner in every respect. The first thing you notice is the people: Indians, Malay and Chinese. The diversity is almost shocking, coming from Japan, and then Indonesia. The mix of races in KL, and Malaysia for the matter was surprising and welcome.

After arriving at the airport, we immediately noticed the humidity, which apparently averages between eighty and ninety percent. It was nighttime and, being a big city, we were skeptical about finding a decent place. After talking with a couple in the travel agency in Jakarta who said that Chinatown in KL was a hole compared to Jalan Jakas in Jakarta (the biggest dump we'd ever seen!), we vetoed staying in Chinatown, the main backpackers haven. Instead we tried phoning (with the free phones provided inside the airport - a great service) some places in the northern part of the city. We made a reservation at Ben Soo's Homestay and got a prepaid cab for 29 ringett,

It's funny about the Ringett, which is broken down into 100 Sen. One dollar was equal to about RM 2.7. However when you go shopping, they always quote prices in dollars and cents (but meaning Ringett and Sen!) which had us doing double takes. And if you look at the one Ringett coin, it has a dollar sign on it!!! It's kind of strange and can cause some communication problems, so after negotiating a price, we always confirmed that it was "Ringett" - especially in Chinatown.

Our less than friendly cab driver eventually kicked us out in the vicinity of Ben Soo's. We kept looking for signs to his place, but had to ask around to find it - it's actually located in an apartment building just off Jalan Tuanru Abdul Rahman (TAR), north of central KL. When we showed up, Ben informed us that another couple had showed up and taken our room - so much for reservations. But Ben is a really nice, helpful guy, and offered to take us to any hotel we wanted. Then he started asking single travelers if they could share their rooms with us. We were pretty grateful as it seemed like a nice place (for a big city) and we sure didn't feel like moving after coming all that way - not at 11:00pm. We ended up staying in separate rooms that night - Beth with a girl named Joe from England, and me with an Aussie.

Ben Soo's Homestay truly was a homestay - we ate breakfast in their kitchen! It was run by Ben and his mother (who couldn’t speak a word of English but smiled and laughed a lot) and sometimes his cute 4-year-old nephew did chores. Ben has plastered tons of info on the walls of the rooms, toilets and common rooms. Everything from schedules, to my favourite "don't befriend any sweet talking humans by the liquor store outside this building". Having a friendly owner really makes your stay so much more enjoyable. We talked to some backpackers who hated KL, but invariably they stayed in some crack in the wall in Chinatown. Cleanliness and friendliness of the place can make or break your entire stay, anywhere.

Malaysian food was awesome, and by Malaysian, I'm talking about the three varieties - Indian, Chinese and Malay. Malay food is similar to Indonesian, but better. It seemed to have a greater variety, especially noodle dishes. The meat was also of much higher quality, and you could actually lose the feigned "I'm a vegetarian" act when eating in Malaysia. Experiencing eating at a small Indian restaurant is great. We ate at a couple of places in the central market where you go up and try to order, but they literally start slapping food down on your plate and give it to you - and it was always incredible.

Our first day, we decided to get oriented with the city, so we set off with Joe and a Swede named Patrik. Getting around in KL is pretty easy, as it's a fairly centrally concentrated city. Everywhere you looked there were new buildings springing up, but the expansion was balanced out by lots of trees and acres of parkland in the center of the city. There were tons of buses flying around, cheap taxis, the new LRT which was good to get from the north end to the Central Market, or you could easily get around by walking. We set out for the Malaysian TIC where we met a really helpful lady, Anna, who gave us loads of info on the national parks and getting around, and even suggested a route for us based on our time constraints and budget. Since we were staying with a friend in Singapore on August 25^th, we decided to that after leaving KL, we would start in the northwest of the country, work our way down the coast, arrive at Singapore, then go up the east coast making our way up to Thailand.

Anna said that we "must go up the KL Tower" so we did and got a first hand look at the new emerging modern capital, slightly shrouded in what we thought was a layer of pollution but ended up being the beginnings of a terrible haze from huge forest fires that were burning in nearby Sumatra. After that, we caught a cab to the central market with the friendliest taxi driver we had ever had. He was an Indian guy and he was so enthusiastic about his city - he gave us so much information that it probably made our stay in KL that much better.

The Central Market was coincidentally in the center of the city (!), right next to Chinatown and surrounded by buses and taxis. It was a great jumping off point for most sights, and almost anything of interest is within easy walking distance. The market itself was an indoor warehouse of small gift shops. The second level also had some excellent hawker food and Indian restaurants.

We were pretty tired, so we started making our way back to Ben's. On the way we walked by Merdeka Square - a cricket ground surrounded by amazing Moorish designed buildings that were beautifully lit up at night. Medeka Square also boasted “one of the highest flagpoles in the world” – I love how no matter where you went in the world, every location boasted of some world record or another. “I can’t believe I found it… the highest flagpole in the world! My quest is complete”.

On our second day in KL, we took a public bus out of the city to the Batu Caves. After an interesting 45-minute bus ride surrounded by smiling locals, we got off and got a peak at the huge natural caves. It's also the location of a yearly festival where they put hooks in men's backs - you see pictures of it everywhere. At the foot of the stairs leading up to the caves were hundreds of pigeons - which seemed to amuse the visiting Chinese tourists - and quite a few monkeys. We even saw two newborn monkeys with their mothers. The climb up (272 steps - why do they always count the steps to these places? Mt. Bromo was 24 steps….) was made a little hairy by camera grabbing monkeys. When we got to the top and inside the caves, we really felt the overwhelming size. It was definitely worth it because A) it was cheap (70 sen) and B) it didn’t take long and gave you a breather from the city.

At night we went to Chinatown to eat. We came up to two identical street restaurants - one completely empty, one totally full. In front of each one was a young Chinese guy trying to woo customers to his respective restaurant. I wondered if ours (the popular one) was really better, or if it was just the first place to get some customers that night and the rest of us followed like sheep? We weren't expecting a traditional Chinese meal (where you order a bunch of dishes and share them all) so we ended up ordering a ton of food.

Beth couldn't resist anymore, so we went through all the crowded street stalls and found a cheap "Esprit" tank top. I sarcastically wondered if it was the real thing? You could get anything there. After reading reports about pirated CD's, videos and software, I finally saw what they were talking about: just released in the theater movies on video and DVD for $4 USD, Windows 95 for $8 USD, CD's for $5 USD and any brand of clothing you could imagine.

We had two more days in KL and it was about one too many. The first day we walked around the Central Market and from there to the train station - another magnificent Moorish building. We then walked down to the National Museum, which acts as the southern gateway to the acres of parkland in the western section of KL. There's plenty to do there, but we only had the energy for the Planetarium and the Bird Park. The Planetarium was great - that is, it had air conditioning. Let me make this abundantly clear: KL is hot and humid. KL is hot and humid. KL is hot and humid. That said, the Planetarium show was crap, but there was the A/C…. When I say, "I went to the Bird Park" I know what you're thinking. But we had a lot of time, and I would recommend it. It was a huge, net-covered park area with thousands of tropical birds with astonishing colours and sounds. The impact was even greater when we looked around at the jungle surroundings and realized that we were standing less than two kilometers from the center of the capital of Malaysia. We were so desperate for something cool, when we got out of the park that we tried durian popsicles. Durian was a strange looking local fruit that was described to us perfectly as “looks like shit, smells like shit and tastes like shit” – I can confirm that that description was apt, even by trying it in the form of a frozen, diluted version of the fruit. We had to catch a cab back, and since the driver held all the power (it was pretty deserted) he got us for RM 10 for the 20-minute ride back to Ben's.

Indian was the night's choice for food, and we played it by the book and went "Bangles" - a slightly upscale place with lots of variety, good food and unfortunately an annoying middle-aged matron who pressured us to buy more the entire evening. She was so pestering I would boycott the place on that fact alone! Little India, right near there, proved to be dead at night, but just beyond we were able to see all the lit-up trees in the center of the city - no doubt to the bane of local taxpayers.

Our bus up the coast to Penang left at midnight so we had to blow time. What better thing to do than see a movie - unfortunately we (I) chose the latest Batman installment "Batman Forever" which must have been named after the perceived length of the movie. We did find an Internet café on the 3^rd floor of Kotaraya - a shopping complex right near Pudaraya Bus Station and convenient to Chinatown and the Central Market. After we claimed to be students (hey, we had no job at the time!) we were charged the absurdly low rate of RM 5 for 30 minutes or RM 8 for 60 minutes! We discovered that our new free web browser email account at mailcity.com was working like a charm. Luckily, it was cheap as we had a lot of stuff in our inbox.