East Asia 2023: Part Three. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
8/10/23 Kuala Lumpur
Due to the coming of the apocalypse and unsuitable footwear last night, I was unable to spend my last 660,000 dong (£22). Luckily, Da Nang International is a member of the Worldwide Union of Airport Thievery and it covers the price of two coffees and a sandwich. Coincidentally, it was the same cost as a ticket to Kuala Lumpur.
We get through the airport easily enough where a pre-arranged taxi is meant to be waiting. Nothing. There’s no data roaming for me at KL airport. Try to connect with airport wifi but it demands I register and confirm by email, which of course I cannot. Only because I happen to be leaning on the airport wifi help desk, a lady tells me I can type in anything, not confirm by email, and it works. Then there’s a barrage of WhatsApp messages from taxi drivers, taxi companies, Airbnb hosts and assistants etc. All sent when we were flying. I have to send my picture to the taxi driver, his to me, ours to his boss, and we finally meet.
Roaming fails again and doesn’t kick in until 20km from KL centre. A guy called Alvin, who has tried to call six times, demands I tell him the taxi registration and exact time of arrival so he can generate a QR code, valid for 15 minutes, that allows the taxi to pull up in front of the behemoth of a building. The nice driver has never heard of such a thing. I argue with Alvin because I’m starting to get very pissed off. We arrive, the driver asks the security guard why this is necessary and gets the answer ‘I don’t know, I’m just doing my job.’ Poor flustered Alvin, who is actually lovely, meets us and gives us keys. It seems like we’re visiting the Pentagon, but it’s actually a very cheap place to stay.
Nice spacious apartment on the 18th floor of a huge twin-tower like building. It has a small balcony, which is all very well unless you have a fear of heights, like Claire. The view reminds me of Birmingham with skyscrapers. We then spend an hour trying to escape because we haven’t clocked which floor we’d initially taken the lift from. Keep on getting lost in car parks. Not a good start.
There’s a big shopping centre around the corner by an arcade that’s full of chain restaurants and inaccurately named ‘Gourmet Street.’ They have a Thai street food festival going on, with big screens showing the Rugby World Cup and Premiership Football. Beer is a plenty, albeit not available to Muslims. It reminds me of Bromley, if Bromley had an upmarket mall, decent food, clean streets, fair prices and wasn’t full of arseholes. To be clear, none of these apply to Bromley.
Kuala Lumpur really is the dystopian future. It’ll take a bit of getting used to. I was prepared to say it was mist earlier in the day but, nah, it’s smog. The one positive thing I can say though is that, just like Birmingham of course, everyone is terribly nice.
9/10/23 Kuala Lumpur
Despite my meticulous preparations I had failed to add a credit card to the Grab app in the UK, and my banks’ verification codes do not have a +44, so we’re at the mercy of the KL integrated public transport system. KL does not do short stops, so there’s a 25-minute walk through the intense heat to get to the metro. Go the wrong way out of Muzium Nevada station and end up in an office complex, drinking a terrible cappuccino from Costa Coffee, feeling very hot and pissed off. Google-sodding-Maps tells me it’s an hour’s walk to the National Museum, but I look out of a window and there it is - across a motorway. With the help of one of the many security guards, a lift to the basement and an underpass we use common sense, ignore the Museum and go to the Botanical Gardens.
Once the noise of traffic abates, the gardens are very pleasant, almost deserted and full of iguanas (well, there were two). Hot though. Apparently, the smog I mentioned before, which here they call ‘the haze,’ is a result of peat and rainforest burning in Sumatra rather than traffic pollution in Malaysia. Air quality is supposedly better than London. Doesn’t make it any easier to breathe though.
Go to the Butterfly Park which is small, lacking in detail, but rather charming. Rather than walk around, I sit under a fan in a treehouse where the beautiful huge butterflies come to die (they only live 14 days, 7 in the wild).
Then we go to the bird park, the largest open aviary in the world, so the sign says. It’s pretty good. In the parrot enclosure, several loriini do to my head what the little carnivorous fish did my feet in Cat Ba. I’m sure I had more hair when I left England.
The Bird Park is nowhere near any public transport and there’s no way I’m walking any more in this heat. Thanks to a lovely waiter at the Hornbill Cafe, a cash Grab-cab is arranged to return us to our terrifying tower block, and then it’s a monorail to meet Yew Jin in Bukit Bintang. Ex-room-mates at school, haven’t seen each other for forty years. Have a nice early dinner on the 6th floor of the epic Pavilion Plaza shopping centre, which Yew Jin generously pays for. He lives out of town and hardly comes into KL at all these days, but kindly points us in the direction of Vice City before his journey home.
Tiger Street, as it likes to style itself (it’s actually called Jalan Alor Food Street), is fabulous and (sorry Yew Jin), everything we could have wanted from Kuala Lumpur. A long, brightly-lit road on a downwards trajectory with hundreds of simple, no-nonsense restaurants and street food stalls. Even in the pouring rain, large bottles of Tiger beer in hand, it’s a joy to behold.
There are many durian stalls, something I’ve not tried before. Not cheap, buy a tiny amount of the inner fruit for 20 ringgits (£3.50 maybe). It’s incredible! At first it tastes of chicken, then potato, then mango, then cheese, then I don’t know what, with the lingering aftertaste of fish guts. Claire instantly spits hers out and declares it the worst thing she’s ever tasted in her life, but she didn’t eat the rotten shark I had in Iceland.
Indeed, durian is a delicacy here, it’s not just for the tourists. There are at least eight different types on offer – I don’t know how they differ because, obviously, I only have the one – but you see it being sampled by locals in seedy back-street shacks, the buyers crouching over the wares as though they’re buying drugs.
Then we go to Bar Street, or whatever they call it (actually Changkat Bukit Bintang). Lots of pubs, Happy Hour until 10pm, smoke and drink on a high table on the pavement, watching World Cup cricket. Bar staff compete to attract customers, spending more time on this than serving or fetching bills. Good music in the bar we chose, which may have been why we’re the only ones there. A party of 20 Australian tourists amble down the street, uncertain where they’re going and the excitement and nervous energy of the staff is palpable. So close, but no.
Malaysia is a seemingly happy mixture of races and cultures - Malay, Cantonese and Tamil being most prominent. Our cab driver argued otherwise, but I don’t know, it seems more harmonious than most places I’ve been to, including the UK. The tranquil call to prayer is respected, as are the Hindu and Buddhist temples. Despite the horrible city-centre motorways, soul-destroying shopping malls and baffling transport system, I’m beginning to like KL.
10/10/23 Kuala Lumpur
Having gone the hang, sort of, of this Metro/Monorail thing we chance upon the Central Market, which is fine. We reach Petaling Street eventually, stumbling through the unfortunate homeless Bangladeshis. The market has plenty of street food, but the stalls all sell useful things such as suitcases, shoes and t-shirts, so it’s a bit boring. It reminds me of East Street. The Google-map (GM) signposted flea market is closed, or has never existed as the site is occupied by a Chinese pre-marriage registration office in a Buddhist temple. But even in this busy area KL is pretty chilled. Nobody honks their horn, cars will slow down rather than run you over and everything is one way, so you’re not going to be attacked by a moped over your right shoulder. We have a nice coffee and Claire gets lost coming back from the loo.
We take the metro to KLCC, close to the Petronas Towers, which we’re not going up for height-related reasons. The city centre of KL isn’t that big at all, but it’s complicated (and hot) to walk around. GM is hopeless. My theory is the shopping malls don’t allow GM as they actively want consumers to get lost. Exiting KLCC station you enter a circular mall that would have had us back to our start point in half an hour. Randomly breaking free into KLCC park, where the completely-ignored penalty for smoking is 2 years imprisonment or stoning to death, GM says it’s an 18-minute walk to the aquarium. One minute if you walk across the grass. Yes, we went to another aquarium. It’s no Osaka, but kinda intimate with the slowest moving shark tunnel walkway we’ve ever been on.
We could have used air-conditioned walkways to get back, but you need a degree in KL-ology to understand where they go, so we take the hot, sweaty, squalid route through the rat-infested streets of Bukit Bintang. Back at Barad-dur, I check out the infinity pool on the 35th floor which is terrifying. We go to the 3rd floor instead, where the pool is huge and lovely and we’re the only ones there, perhaps because it’s monsoon hour. The thunder and lightning crackle and boom around us. It’s exhilarating, but we leave when the rain starts to hurt our heads.
Back to Tiger Street for dinner, having expertly learned the route through the car parks. We’re in Malaysia, have to eat a chilli crab, plucked reluctantly from its tank. It’s served burning hot, but the taste is better after cooling. Claire decides she can’t be bothered so I have to pick the whole thing from its soft shell, takes an hour or so. Some nightcaps on Bar Street, where the red-light district becomes more apparent.
Like Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur did not appeal at first. Unlike Hanoi, it became easier to negotiate and appreciate. People are polite, and nice. They speak English, drive on the left, not on the wherever-you-can-get-through, they use British plugs and you can flush toilet paper. Obviously, it’s hot and humid as Satan’s sauna, you can barely see the sky through the ‘haze,’ there’s a motorway where Regent’s Street should be and the tap water tastes of egg. But I might even miss the city of confusing malls and the back streets with their sweet stench of durian.
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