Kuala Lumpur Travel Report Part 1

I’ve been on the road again – to Malaysia for the first time.

The schedule was a bit challenging: Work required me to be in Penang on Monday morning. So I arranged things that I could spend the weekend in Kuala Lumpur and fly in to Penang on the evening of Sunday the 30th. I arrived in KL at 4:15 in the morning and took a cab to the city. KL’s airport is a bit like Narita, many miles away and there was nothing to see yet in the dark. I had booked a hotel with Petronas Towers view and the taxi rode past them, but at 5 in the morning they are not lit up and looked not very impressive yet.

I asked the hotel for an early check in but could only get one together with a room upgrade… well, you live only once! So, I checked into my luxury room with Towers view and fell into bed for some 2.5 hours. Up at 9, the sun was shining and the Petronas towers presented themselves in full beauty. All that steel makes them shine like silver depending on how the sunlight falls on them.

I ventured out into the brooding tropical heat after breakfast and arrived at the towers at 11:00 in the morning. I thought to get up right away and queued for the tickets, only to have the guy at the counter telling me, oh, the first slot I can give you is at 13:00. Oops. I had no desire to hang out there for two hours and asked for a later slot, 5 p.m.

Boarding the subway system of KL for the first time (the subway is token based like the one in Istanbul, easy to use and wonderfully cooled), I headed for the Jamek mosque, one of the oldest mosques in KL. In the city map’s mini-guide book that I had received at the hotel it said it would be open for visitors until 13:00.

I arrived at the mosque at around 12:15 and it was closed for prayer preparations… hu… non-believers could only wander around its outside, women clad in screaming red full body “rental” capes and men in shorts had to put on long pants. Since I couldn’t get inside, that visit was quick and wandered instead through an adjacent, small and tacky bazaar. They had nothing but tinker and I went back to the subway station, riding on one station to Pasar Seni, the central market. That market has an outside area and a cooled down building next to it. If very tourist oriented and having loads of souvenir junk to offer, it has a nice, colorful atmosphere. I ate an adventurous chicken-based noodle soup in its air conditioned food-court and then went on to find my first Indian temple ever.

So far I have not yet been to India (it’s ranking high on my bucket list and I hope to be able to get there soon) so this was my first Hindu experience. The Sri Mahamariamman Tempel (Indian names are tough) looked very original and beautiful to me, and I’ll be thrilled to compare it with temples in the home country one day. Right next door was a great Chinese temple as well. To access the Hindu temple, the only thing you had to get rid of were your shoes, and you can just walk as you are into the Chinese temple.

Behind a shopping street through Chinatown, I tried to get to a large park that looked close and easy to reach on my map. On the way were another two Chinese temples, one under heavy restoration, the other in use. My way ended next to the second temple at a large highway that was impossible to cross and on its other side were trees, yes, but also a construction site. Hm… I gave up on the park due to these obstacles and another one – heat! Over Chinatown also fat thunder storm clouds were brewing and it started to rain when I arrived back at the subway station.

Needing a break from the heat and rode to the Petronas Towers to cool down in its refrigerator, Christmas-decorated shopping mall, then discovered a beautiful and wide park right behind the towers. In the rear part of the park is a free paddling pool, if you can call it that. The water didn’t look deeper than 50 cm. Mostly children used the pool with their parents supervising them. Notably, the girls go into the water fully clothed.

Malaysia’s population consists of 50% Malay, who are mostly Muslims, then some 20% Chinese and the rest is made up of various other ethnic minorities with the biggest two of them being of Indian and indigenous origin. The Malay women usually wear head-scarfs but do not hide their faces. Funny that even in a country with close to zero Christians there is X-mas decoration all over the place – well, it’s pretty and serves commercial purposes.

It was raining, stopping, raining, KL is currently in the rainy season. I was grateful for that though, since the rain takes a bit of the heat away.

Finally it was time to get up the towers and after rather hefty security measures (you have to go through a full fledged security scan, then, despite that, deposit your bag, and there is always a guard around wherever you go), a small group of twenty people, forced to wear red badges, was allowed up an elevator to the Skybridge first, that connects the two towers at floors 41 and 42. My group was the first that had the 5 pm slot and we were alone on the Skybridge for ten minutes. After ten minutes you have to wait at the elevator again (roped off, guard in front of you) while the second 5 pm group with green badges is allowed on the bridge. When the third group with blue badges arrives, the first group with the red badges is allowed further up.

The elevator brought us to floor 83, where we had to change elevators into two smaller ones, since the towers thin out at the top and these brought us up another 3 floors to the highest, 86. There is an 87th floor, but it’s off-limits. Since I was in the first group with the red badges, we had the 86th floor to ourselves for ten minutes, until the second group came up, which was great, since it gave us some time and space to explore the view without too many people in the way. So, if you ever go up the Petronas Towers, queue so that you get into the first twenty of your slot.

I really like the towers’ design with the alternating round, angular, round shape, all that silver looking steel and the cone shape with the spires on top. To me the towers look highly esthetically pleasing and I’ve become quite a fan of their architecture.

The view from atop the towers is of course very nice too, if it was obstructed by clouds. I spent more than an hour on the towers in total (they let groups green and blue mingle with the red one and that means red could stay longest).

It started to constantly rain from around 16:30 by the way and when I finally got down from the towers it was almost time for dinner. The shopping mall at the foot of the towers was bursting with people and frozen down to a ridiculous degree. I ended up eating Italian pizza in a roofed, outside restaurant at the foot of the towers, where it was not too warm or too cold thanks to the rainy weather.

After a brief stint back in the hotel to drop off my luggage, I ventured to the towers again to get night shots of them. The large pond behind the towers, which marks the beginning of the park, is having rainbow-lit fountain displays to music, which was quite nice (if reminding me a bit of Las Vegas).

The park was deserted in the nightly rain apart from a few picture hunting tourists like me and I got some excellent shots of lit up Petronas towers with clouds around them. The amount of energy going into lighting them up like that must be ridiculous, but it does look great.



With the nightly Petronas Towers pictures in my camera, I went back to the hotel and fell into bed.

Stay tuned for my visit to the incredible Batu caves the next day in next weekend’s blog. Pictures of them are already on Flickr, if you want a sneak preview.