Kuala Lumpur

Fly day to Kuala Lumpur (KL)

We left Sydney on Thurs 22nd July, spending the 1st 1.5 hrs waiting for the a/c to be fixed.
A Dr was requested for an ailing passenger... not a great start on our Malaysian Airlines flight.
Flying NW over the flooded outback of NW NSW was awesome, ribbons of green on either side of rivers and lots of white rimmed lakes formed from formerly dry salt pans.
The colours varied, presumably due to the amount of water flowing down from Quensland that flooded over the summer (Dec09 - Apr10??).
Instead of it being a red-dry + scrubby tree sight all the way across the Oz continent, it has these awesome change of colours.
Farmers say many of them have not seen this much water flowing down their rivers in their lifetime...mostly 50 yr old + so thats a really long time!!!

We caught the express train into KL - 28mins for 72km trip to Sentral Station.
Another transfer after some help from the locals to get an elevated light rail link up to China town.
No dramas finding the hotel - still a very humid 28 degrees celcius plus at 11pm.
Our first smell after getting off the awesome trains and onto the street was the smell of rotting rubbish (bacteria mostly I guess).
Welcome to tropical Asia.
We havent smelt the smell since, but its out there!

We got to our hotel room, but were hardly able to swing a cat in the room that looked like a decent sized Western hotel room on the internet.
Definitely not the feature rm that was on the net, but hey thats always the way...


Fri 23rd July.
We tucked in to the complimentary breakfast at the Swiss Hotel.
It was a full cooked buffet breakfast (not the continental we had on our ticket - bonus and free credits to the hotel!)
So much for losing weight... we waddled out of the buffet and wandered the streets in Chinatown.
Boy was this a great Chinatown....
Food, markets, hotels, backpackers, you name it, it was there!

We did a Chinatown + Little India walking tour from the Lonely Planet in the humid sun that broke thru about mid-day.

We met a lovely couple - Amie + Craig from Birmingham and chatted for an hour mid-way thru our hotel checking out wander.
We found hotels of lesser quality with their own bathrooms for US$15- $20.
Cheaper than our internet booking at US$37 using expedia.

After working up an apetite, we went on to a local foodcourt.
US$1.20 for a prawn rice or noodle lunch and a tropical fruit drink (water down though).

A lazy late-afternoon at the hotel and out for dinner.
A bit disappointing at US$5 for meal + drink - but not bad.
Amie +Craig wandered by soon after we ordered dinner, so we arranged to go to Batu Caves North of the city the next day at 8:30am.
So we got an early night ...

Sat 24th July - Batu Caves day
We met Amie + Craig at 8:30 and wandered 4mins to a local bus terminal and got the bus to Batu Caves .
It must have taken 50 mins to get there, along city streets and several multi-lane freeways.
The caves looked impressive but were so so as far as caves go.
We didnt do the show caves, just the Hindu decorated caves with their temples at various spots and plenty of cheeky monkeys all over.
To be honest they were the highlight of the outing apart from plenty of good conversation with Amie and Craig.

We caught the bus back to Chinatown and had lunch in a local food alley.
I had pork noodles and Karen had vegie noodles.
K had a coffee and I had a mango jucie - pretty watered down also - but all that for $1.
Amie & Craig had Duck noodles that they said was great.

Sun 25th
We caught a bus out the highways to the out of town bus terminal in the south to buy our tickets.
After just about being mugged getting off the bus by hawkers we were taken to a bus counter and bought a $6 ticket to Lumut - 4hrs NW of KL.
From there we will go to Pangkor Island for the working week to avoid the crowds and high prices.

Back in KL, we wandered in and around the Petronis Towers.
They are very impressive architecturally!!!!
We wandered around the lovely show-lake and water park.