Having said our goodbyes in the Country Girl the previous evening, in driving Snow, I arrived bright and early at Pauls to pick up him and Kerri for the trip to our waiting aeroplane at London Heathrow.
There was still a lot of ice on the roads but it had stopped snowing and the sun was out, the M40 was gloriously empty and I managed to touch 100MPH on some downhill stretches. Paul and Kerri seemed mostly to be asleep but soon woke up when I crashed into the wall of the car park signalling our arrival at Heathrow.
My car was staying with Lucy who was going to meet us at the airport and get the keys and stuff off me, this all went very smoothly and before long we were installed on the plane excited but a little tired.
On the plane I watched the Incredibles, twice, but didn't get much in the way of sleep since I was too excited about being on holiday and airline seats are not exactly comfortable.
KL airport is quite big with lot's of internal trains, escalators and levels but luckily Paul had been there before and had us on the train to KL Central Station in no time. The train was very modern with TV screens showing the news in them, weirdly the news was all in English which led me to speculate that maybe the TV had a nationality sensor in it and could change to any language to suit the listener. I don't think this was the case.
Outside KL Central Station was my first experience of open air Malaysia, it was hot - very hot despite it being only around 10 in the morning. Paul pointed out the large high rise where he used to live with Suriana and we caught a taxi to our pre-booked hotel in Chinatown.
It being so early Chinatown wasn't very busy so we found the hotel easily, the taxi driver arranged to come and pick us up when we had to leave and Paul carefully got him to confirm where he would be and the arrangements.
After a quick shower and some confusion about what was booked in the hotel we all changed into shorts, T-Shirts and other appopriate clothing and hit the streets to find some breakfast and have a look around. We wanted to basically stay awake all day to fight the jet lag and have a fairly early night for more sightseeing the next day.
Paul knows a variety of run down looking shopping centres through which we passed and stopped in to eat, I am not a fan of rice and curry type things and none of the food we ate in these establishments did anything to change that.
Eventually after some wandering and train rides we ended up in at the Petronas Towers which is the tallest building in Malaysia and was briefly the tallest building in the world. It's quite impressive but contains a giant shopping centre of which you quickly get very bored. Outside it's better since there is a large lake with fountains and an air conditioned plaza where you can sit out and have a drink, this we did whilst planning our next move.
The second tallest building in Malaysia, and actually the tallest measured from height above sea level, is the communication tower which you can go right to the top of and look around. I wanted to do that to get some idea of the geography and because ever since going up the Twin Towers I have liked tall buildings. It was too hot to walk so we lazily caught a taxi.
The tower is placed in the middle of a small park and contains absolutley nothing of interest on the ground floor or outside so we headed straight for the lift to the viewing gallery. Lots of nice views over the city and the ground did look a long way off.
With only a small pause for Paul & Kerri to go and get some mozzie spray we headed to an exciting sounding park which contained a planetarium and the worlds largest aviary. During the short wait for Paul & Kerri I sat in the taxi and the driver and I read each other War & Peace out loud, we were just getting to the end before they arrived back so now I will never know how it finishes.
The planetarium is amusing, it was obviously built and then has had absolutley no money spent on it or anything repaired or changed in 20 years. There was a very amusing "zero gravity room" which you had to crawl into through a tube, the floor was all wonky and it made you feel very dizzy, added to the affects of jet lag and general exhaustion it had a very powerful effect !
The aviary is huge and full of birds, all kinds of birds everywhere. It took us a good while to walk around it by which time we were all starving hungry so it was time for some food. Paul convinced us that the best food in Malaysia is sold on the sides of busy roads and he knew exactly which busy roadside the cream of these vendors frequent. Hours later after a long fruitless walk down the side of a busy road being marinated with car fumes and sweat Paul conceded defeat and admitted he was lost so we headed back to the food court in Petronas Towers and got something to eat there.
Handily right outside the food court the bars we had been in earlier were beginning to liven up and it looked like a band of some sort was setting it's self up. Paul went to sleep, Kerri and I began drinking.
The bar was an awful awful covers band, none of them could sing properly and the music was atrocious but Paul slept on and we continued drinking - waking Paul every now and again to pour beer down his throat.
By 3AM we were all very drunk, the bar had closed an hour or so ago delivering it's final jugs of beer to our table which we were coming to the end of. It was weird sitting in a totally deserted shopping centre with a table full of beer, the lights all off in a foreign land. Our plan of getting a reasonably early night had obviously failed.
My room in the hotel was a small dark box with no windows which is what I blaming for me waking up around 3PM the next afternoon, not exactly the early start I was imagining, it did cross my mind that Paul & Kerri may have arisen early, tried to wake me and left for a days exciting sight seeing but in fact it took them a further hour or two to wake up properly.
Over 'breakfast' in Paul and Kerris room ( which Paul & I had gone out to buy in the now amazingly busy China town ) Paul decided to give Surina a call and try arrange a meeting later. After a few false starts and some confusion it was agreed to meet in McDonalds at the Station later on.
In the meantime breakfast wasn't especially filling so we headed off into the madness of China town to go to a special food quarter Paul knew about which did excellent "street food".
The exit from the hotel exited into a dress shop and the kitchen of a chinese resteraunt through which you had to negotiate your way past hot pans and excited chefs to reach the street. Down each side of the, pedestrianised, street were stalls selling all kinds of foods and knock off goods whilst the central area was thronged by slow moving hordes attempting to find paths past the huge number of CD and Watch salesmen.
Eventually we found our way to a taxi and arrived at Pauls chosen location. The street food turned out to be a row of burger vans down a dirt track with some plastic tables in the middle. Even Paul couldn't find anything he wanted to eat here ( not a fish head curry in sight ) so we tried the other side of the street which had a lot more convential types of eatier. The Chinese place we ended up in was nice and the food I had was also nice but we didn't have much time to eat it due to our imminent rendevous with Suriana.
We were only half an hour late and in Mc Donalds there was no sign of Suriana, Kerri and I were of the opinion she had probably got bored of waiting and left but Paul was not so sure ( presumably because his perpetual lateness was a feature he thought she'd probably remember ). It turned out Paul was right and some time later Paul, Kerri, Suriana and her Mum were enjoying a coffee in McDonalds.
Surianas mum suggested we go for some proper coffee somewhere nicer to which we also instantly agreed, we would go in her car which was parked nearby and do some sight seeing on the way. For some reason I was imagining we were going to some kind of leafy cafe with bamboo railings high on a hill above the hustle and bustle of the city with nice waitresses and hanging lanterns illuminating the deep greens and browns of the surrounding Jungle but this turned out to be an utterly unrealistic fantasy.
The atmosphere seemed to me to be a little towards to the "strained" end of the spectrum and conversation occured in brief flurries marooned in a windless ocean of glancing and hesitancy. However we all persevered as Surianas mother manauvered her tank like car around the narrowest streets we could find in search of some kind of mysterious foul smelling fruit which she wanted us to try. In the event we couldn't find the shop she was looking for so settled for a few photographs of the worlds tallest flagpole which was built to celebrate Malaysias independance from the British Empire.
We ended up in what is probably Kuala Lumpars version of Broad Street ( except without the drunken morons ) in an Italian resteraunt which was about as far from my hill top idyll as it was possible to get. Kerri ordered first plumping for a nice alcholic lager and was followed by everyone else including, unusually, Paul ordering non alcoholic concoctions. Conversation began to flow a little more easily and I certainly had a quite a nice time before it was time for Suriana and her mother to leave.
After that we all thought we needed a good drink and wandered up and down the street to find bars with big jugs of beer. After we spent some time doing that we headed off back in the direction of China Town to find a Reggae Bar I had seen a sign post for earlier in the day.
The Reggae bar wasn't playing any Reggae but it was quite busy and there were a lot of very drunk, very young Malays on a night out. During the course of the evening the DJ succumbed to our requests for some real Reggae, the barman introduced a couple of English lads to us who we chatted with for the rest of the night until we were all kicked out, drunk again.
For our last day in Malaysia we decided to go and see the Batu caves which are limestone caves in a large rock outcrop a couple of miles from the centre of KL. The caves themselves contain temples and a lot of religious artwork and models.
The first thing we saw on arrival was a vast tower of scaffolding obscuring two large figures of ( presumably ) some kind of religious diety placed on either side of the caves entrance and towering over the car park and forecourt area we had arrived in. The caves appear to be marooned in a very unlovely industrial zone and are framed by factory chimmenys and horrible buildings.
In the forecourt area there are various food and souvener shops leading up to a vast staircase which takes you into the main cave it's self. A lot of monkeys use the staircase to play on and beg for food from tourists but they do make the climb more interesting.
To be honest I thought the caves were horrible, the floors have been concreted and little block houses and walls built around the edges which robs them of any feeling of naturalness they may have once possessed, there is litter and graffitti everywhere and a pervasive unpleasant smell everywhere. At the end of the cave is a temple which appears to be have built in the concrete block style of architecture and a large natural hole in the roof leading into a steep cliff face with a lot of monkey families playing on it. There were a few feral cats wandering about and I spent most of my time in the cave watching them hunt things.
After looking around some more of the caves and making up our own stories about the meaning of the various models and dioramas in them we headed off in search of the increasingly mystical "street food" Paul was so in love with. The taxi driver had no idea what Paul was on about or where he could find anything approximating his description of what this "street food" entailed so he dropped us somewhere near China town next to a horrible shopping centre cafe. In the UK we'd call it a greasy spoon and I wasn't at all impressed with the food.
Having spent some time listening to and talking with the taxi drivers in Malaysia it's a wonder the country isn't in a state of civil war, alternately our drivers would launch into apoplectic monologues about the numerous faults and their resentment towards either muslims or non muslim malays and how they had cornered the market in shady underhand dealings to force the other group of the taxi driving/property/job markets. The only thing they were all agreed on was in an overwhelming hatred of the Chinese.
Our taxi driver to the airport ( once we'd met him - Paul was convinced we needed to go in the 180 degree opposite direction to the actual place we had arranged ) was no different but when he wasn't cursing the Chinese he found time to tell us about all the "Number 1 in the World" things which Malaysia had, these included the Flagpole ( which we already knew about ), the Petronas Towers, a giant shopping mall and various aspects of the Grand Prix circuit. We were able to tell him he could also count the Aviary as the worlds largest outdoor Aviary which pleased him enourmously.
The flight to Melbourne was long and tedious, there was a beeping warning beeper beeping annoyingly above my beeping head every 3 beeping seconds for 2 beeping hours until the beeping beep beep flight crew came and turned it beeping well off. Which I was very happy about and prevented the possible slaughter of the entire flight crew.
Comments
Post new comment