Malaysia Update!

Day 72         Kuala Lumpur

Today we arrived in KL. We had a bus ride which was about 4 hours along winding mountainous roads. It was alright though. Our tour leader said there would be a short walk once we got off the bus - yeah right!! So as you may know by now from reading my posts, Asia is incredibly humid! So this '5 minute' walk was actually a 30 minute walk but combined with carrying my 30kgs of accumulated luggage and the heat and humidity felt like forever! We arrived at our hotel which was nice. Jem, Steve, Sophie, Alice and I (the youngens on the tour) went out for none other than Nandos!! They have a Nandos in Malaysia?!?! Who'd have thought it! My excitement of returning home for English food was now suppressed as Nandos fully satisfied my craving mmm. We then decided that we'd do our own little city walking tour in search of the KL tower. We'd got a few leaflets and decided that we'd have to see both the KL tower and the Petronas towers. The KL tower is at a greater height than the Petronas but only because it's built on a hill! You could easily buy tickets to go up the KL but not the Petronas and it was a nice day so we thought we ought to do it today (in Malaysia and Singapore, although the weather is always hot, it's also frequently raining because of their subtropical climates - hence when you have a good day, make the most of it). So we walked through the city and eventually found it - without using maps - which is quite remarkable!! We went up the tower which was really cool as we got a nice view over the whole of the capital including the Petronas towers. It was a bit murky but I think that's partly to do with pollution. Our ticket included a visit to the mini zoo at the bottom of the tower which was a bit weird - it housed 'Malaysia's first two-headed turtle'.. weird. Alice wanted to feed the monkeys and so the zookeeper guy let her but he said no to get too close but she thought it'd be fine 'cause of the metal cage but the monkey reached out and grabbed a chunk of her hair!! It then proceeded to discard most of it and then floss its teeth with the rest of it!!! After that we decided to walk to find some shops and we asked some policemen on the way.. it was a bit difficult (still without a map) but we just walked and walked. After 30 mins we were like okay let's give up and get a taxi, so we flagged one down and he said 'it's right there'! The biggest mall was right in front of us, no further than 30metres!! Hilarious. So we went in and did some shopping and got Starbucks. I replaced my lovely shoes that I adored but got completely ruined whilst travelling so that made me happy. After we thought we'd head to the Petronas towers. We took a random guess at where they'd be and then we saw them in the skyline so we just kept looking up and taking the roads that looked like they were in that general direction. After a short walk we arrived at the Petronas towers. We were all in absolute awe - they are amazing! They're HUGE! And absolutely beautiful!!! We could not stop taking pictures! We went in search of the best angles to take pictures that would get us in as well as all of the towers! Most people's cameras had a hard time getting all of the towers in as you couldn't get far enough away to get them all in. So crouching on the floor we all managed to get photos. Oh my gosh I love these towers so much, so amazing!! They look incredible! We then caught a taxi back to the hotel and as it was about 9pm we thought we'd go straight out for dinner. We headed down to Chinatown, a 10 minute walk, where it had been transformed into a huge night market! It was hard to resist looking at all the stalls but we said we'd head to a restaurant first and shop after. There weren't any nice looking places but we chose the best of a bad bunch and it was on the second floor at an intersection in the pedestrianised area so we had a view over all of the markets which was nice. We just had noodles so it was okay. Afterwards we went down to the market to shop, I didn't get anything but I enjoyed browsing the many stalls. It was like a maze! We then headed back to the hotel after a really busy but great day with a sense of achievement having done so much! BYE.x