Malaysia

  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Sunday, December 30, 2007

KL the capital city of Malaysia with an official  populatation of 1.6M.  We arrived here by bus from Penang. Possibly our best bus journey so far - the coaches were 3 seats across instead of the standard 4, so everyone had a large, wide, reclining armchair - excellent - UK take note!!  We settled our selves into a nice little hotel near China town and Little India so were well located to be able to walk all over town. 

Malaysia has a real mixed bag of cultures and this is evident from all the areas in KL, (Little India, China town) and the various temples from Hinduism, Toaism to Christianity. 

We spent a fantastic New Year's Eve in the centre of KL by Times Square.  After a nice meal we innocently went walking along the main road where a live concert was going on.  We soon realised that people were actually covered in something white from head to toe...we drew attention to ourselves simply by being two westeners walking along the street and looking very clean...so we were soon also covered in foam and silly string! 

Thinking there was no way we weren't getting involved with this tradition, over the course of the night we bought about 20 cans got well stuck in!  No one was safe!  It was great fun! We did get picked on a lot - very few westerners amongst the locals - we gave as good as we got, just a tad out numbered!! A cracking New Years - superb. They also had street DJ's playing until 2am aftre whcih point we headed to a bar/club and had a few for the road....

The following day we were a little jaded so headed to the cinema to watch the new 'Golden Compass'.  We did alot of wandering around all the different areas to get a feel of the place from the Golden Triangle (petrona Towers) to China Town and Little India.

The Petrona Towers were cool close up.  We both thought they would be taller but when we got up the Sky Bridge (160m up) we realised it is pretty impressive and is the 2nd tallest building in the world at 452m...outdone only by the Taipei 101 building in Taipei, but the tallest Twin Towers... 



(Height comparison with the Sears Tower, Taipei 101, Empire State Building and the Petronas Twin Towers)

We had a wander into a local Malay village area nearby the CBD and had lunch at only 15Ringit (2Gbp Total!)  This included drinks and fish/ meat dishes.  Probably one of the cheapest meals but v yummy.