Kuala Lumpur Revisted

Under the Petronas Towers

From Krabi we flew back to KL, Air Asia's hub. We took the same shuttle bus to Sentral station and found our hotel. The hotel was a new one and we really should have thought about this more, but were more in the line of thought that it was new and would be clean, rather than it was new and therefore the staff would be retards. We had booked the rooms separately and paid for them online in advance using a website we'd already used at least four times during the trip and had never had a problem with: latestays.com. (Even after this one negative experience I still highly recommend it). The hotel didn't have our reservation at all. We told them we'd made it through latestays.com and they said that they'd have to call latestays to make sure. I showed the guy the email confirmation I'd gotten, highlighting the "Full Payment Received" section, and was really not happy with this place so far. To begin with Kuala Lumpur is dirty and humid and hot. Then add on the fact that there was burning plastic in a construction site that flooded the area we had to walk through to get to the hotel. Now add in the hotel being difficult. All I wanted was a shower! We finally got our rooms and got the hotel staff to NOT charge our credit cards AGAIN. After relaxing for a few hours Andy and I headed off for some food. We came across an Indian curry house, which happened to have an entire police force dining in it, and went in. We didn't really know how it worked but the waiter/owner/some guy sort of helped us out. We ordered a naan bread each, a big bottle of water, and a few curries- one chicken, one lamb, one each of chickpea, and one each of mint sauce type stuff. Even though we didn't really know what we had it was delicious and only cost 15 Ringget! ($5AUD).

In the morning it was time to go see about the Petronas Towers. We left the hotel at 8am and arrived at the towers by 9am. The line was already very long and tickets were going fast for the earlier time slots. How it works is that there are 40 tickets issued for each time slot that occurs at 15 minute intervals. Also the tickets are FREE but there are only 1400 tickets issued daily and it is first come, first serve, AND it is one ticket per person- so you couldn't go in the morning and pick up 5 tickets for yourself and 4 friends, you have to be there to get a ticket. We ended up getting tickets for 1:30pm. This gave us plenty of time to go back to the hotel for a nap and to check out at noon before heading back (somehow the hotel had contacted latestays.com and figured our shit out). We didn't mind going back and forth either since the public transit system was so cheap (1.60 RM one way, about 50cents AUD).

Waiting in line for tickets

Back at the towers we arrived early and perused the gift shop until it was time to go for our alloted time. First we were given a VIP lanyard and 3-D glasses and were ushered into a small theater. Here we watched a 7 minute video on the towers and then were ushered out and told to wait in line to go through security. THEN it was finally our turn to go up the towers. And when I say go up I mean to the measely 41st floor skybridge that connects the 2 towers. That's the highest they'll let any tourist go. It was a little disappointing as most of us had been higher in other scructures around the world.

Looking down

Stilts holding up the Skybridge

Skybridge

After the towers we headed to Little India for some lunch and shopping. We found ourselves in the Bizaar surrounded by cheap goods and then eventually found a restaurant. The food was pretty good but the night before still stole the show for me anyway.

Mr. Andrew Birmingham very happy about his purchases in Little India

Strolling through the Bizaar in my new hat

After that we were going to try to find Chinatown but someone told us it was too far to walk so we said forget it and went back to the hotel and sat around for an hour or so and then headed off to the airport.

We arrived at the airport with about 6 hours to kill before our flight. Luckily the time went quickly and we were Melbourne bound and on the first leg of my 4 leg journey home.