We arrived at TBS, the main bus station in Kuala Lumpur, a little earlier than we wanted to. It’s very lucky that we did as the queue to collect our tickets took 45 minutes. Wow! Things really are done slowly in Malaysia. We booked our bus to Melaka quite a while back and for £3 each we would be in a VIP bus for 2.5 hours. The bus station at KL was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was like an airport, with security checks and gates. After a quick cup of coffee, we were only 10 minutes early to the gate, despite getting to the airport an hour earlier than we had planned. Really really lucky. The bus was all we had hoped it would be. Our seats were like living room reclining chairs. The only problem was how cold the air con was and after about 2 hours, I was freezing.

We made it to Melaka in time to go to the Sunday night market on Jonker Street. Everything you could imagine was on sale here, from food to gadgets, clothes and souvenirs. Some of the weirder items we saw included, but are not limited to, a samurai sword umbrella, matchstick guns and deep fried fish heads. It was lovely to just walk along the market and eventually we stopped at a restaurant called the Geographer for dinner. I had a sour plum juice and Jonker street chicken satay, which were both delicious. Simon had a sweet curry and also really enjoyed that. We walked down to the river and stumbled across the Hard Rock cafe, so bought the glass, obviously, before heading back to the hotel.

A photo of the Geographer taken in the light of day. 

The next day was very full on. We only had the one full day in Melaka so really wanted to make the most of it. We started by having breakfast at this lovely little cafe called The Daily Fix. The food they served was delicious and a real fusion of Asian and Western flavours. After this we walked down to the Dutch quarter and saw the very typical red coloured buildings that Melaka is known for.

We went into Christ church, which was a very typical church on the inside.

Next we found some cannons at the Melaka fort. We obviously made the most of this.

We spent the next 90 minutes or so walking around the Flora de la mer, the Maritime museum and the Malaysian Navy museum. We learnt a lot about the history of Melaka and how this town used to be a huge hub for trade around the World. Melaka was colonised 5 times in history by the Portuguese, Dutch, British, Japanese and British again. Unfortunately, every time that Melaka was colonised, part of its trade was destroyed and eventually the town lost the glory that it once had.

We’d been told to try a Hokkaido cheese tart whilst in Melaka. It was yummy, but very strange. It was like cream cheese in the middle and the pastry was sweet.

We enjoyed a white coffee (Malaysian coffee) after this and escaped the heat for a while. Mine was iced and came with cendol, which meant it had red beans, gelatinous rice and grass jelly. The coffee was great, the cendol, not so much.

We needed a bit of a rest for a few hours and also we needed to do some research for our time in Singapore so we headed back to the hotel for a bit. After our rest we went for a walk down to and along the river and enjoyed the beautiful buildings, flowers and street art.

We walked down to the sea to see the Straits of Melaka, but there wasn’t a lot there.

We stopped for dinner next in Little India, where we enjoyed banana leaf curry. This is a very typical dish served in Southern Indian. It was unbelievably tasty and super cheap. We weren’t brave enough to eat with our hands though.

Some more street art that we enjoyed on our way to a reggae bar for a beer. Yes, they had dinosaurs.

We had a couple of hours the next day to explore some more of Melaka. After returning to the Daily Fix for another scrummy breakfast, we walked up Bukit St Paul to the old church, which gave some good views back over the town. Unfortunately, the weather had changed and we were getting a bit wet.

We saw some more ruins, A. formosa I believe.

Simon found a dinosaur.

And to finish our time in Melaka, we enjoyed a drink in a pub by the river.

Melaka had been really lovely. For me, it joined Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang and Hoi An in my top places in S.E Asia. Any places that are listed UNESCO World Heritage seem to become an instant favourite with me.

Having said goodbye to Team Thailand. We spent one very uneventful night in a town called Surat Thani. As it was Songkran, everywhere was quite, the water fight excitement from earlier had died down and people were in their homes celebrating with their families. We really struggled to find food, but luckily we found a restaurant after a while.

The next morning we caught a flight to Kuala Lumpur. Our initial plans had involved travelling by land down through Southern Thailand into Malaysia or down through the islands into Malaysia. Unfortunately, due to the timing of the Easter holidays and our guests visiting we didn’t have the time left that we needed to do this. Luckily though we still had a week and we were going to use it well by flying to Kuala Lumpur for 2 nights and then to Melaka for 2 nights and then to Singapore for 3, where we would catch our flight home.

The flight was uneventful only taking an hour and 20 minutes. What was eventful was immigration at Kuala Lumpur airport. It was chaos. We queued for about 80 minutes to get through immigration after a lot of necessary pushing to ensure we weren’t overtaken by other people. It wasn’t a clear line and it definitely wasn’t efficient. Having not eaten since breakfast, and it now being 5pm, we needed food. I’m ashamed to admit that the first meal we had in Malaysia was a KFC, but needs must. We were starving. I have to say, their KFC is better than ours.  Rather than chips, you get potato wedges covered in a very very tasty cheese sauce. Yum! We then spent another 30 minutes struggling to order an uber, but eventually got on our way. Only then did we realise that actually we were about 50 minutes from the city and then we experienced about 40 minutes of delays due to congestion. Let’s just say, it wasn’t the smoothest start to our time here. I was starting to think that maybe we should have spent our last week in Thailand and that we’d made a bit of a mistake, but it was all worth it in the end.

Our accommodation was great, but we hardly saw it. We quickly moved out of the hotel and started exploring. We were staying in an area called Bukit Bintang, which was close to everything we wanted to see. We started off by walking to the Pavillion mall where Simon enjoyed the superhero shop and I enjoyed the Japan section with its cherry blossom display.

We used the walkway that connects the Pavillion mall to KLCC conference centre to walk over to Suria mall and had another look around there. Here we got to see some F1 cars and just take in the sheer size of the malls here in KL. It was then that we got our first view of the Petronas twin towers. This spectacular building held the record for the tallest building in the world between 1998 and 2004 and they are still the tallest twin towers in the world. The really are an impressive site.

We moved around to KLCC park to watch the light symphony at the water fountain,  which also gave us some more amazing views of the towers. The light show was nothing too special, but the photos we got were definitely worth it.

We got up early the next day as we were taking part in a free walking tour. It had been a while since we’d been on a free walking tour, but if you are an avid reader of the blogs, you will remember a lot of them in Australia and New Zealand. This one was a heritage walk run by the KL government and was really interesting. Our first stop of the tour was to the city gallery where we learnt about the history of Kuala Lumpur, right from when it was a cowboy town, settled by the Chinese to make the most of the tin ore found here through to the current day developments. During the British settlement one of the residents moved the capital of Malaysia to KL to be closer to the tin and all the money. The heritage buildings that we looked at on the tour were the buildings built by the British during the colonisation. This ended in 1957.

 

Our second stop was to Independence Square which was where the British flag was lowered in 1957 and the Malaysian flag was raised for the first time. The green patch in front was used as a cricket field by the British, but cricket never really took off so it eventually got used for playing football, which did take off. Surprise surprise. 

We walked around the textiles museum, which was originally the building of the Federated Malay States Railway, and got to see some traditional outfits worn by many of the ethnic groups that live in the area. Also during our time here, our guide told us about the architecture of the buildings, which were a mix of Islamic, Asian and Western details. The buildings were definitely not like anything I had ever seen before.

Next we were shown why Kuala Lumpur has its name. In Malay Kuala means ‘where two rivers meet’ and Lumpur means mud or muddy. So Kuala lumpur literally means a muddy place where two rivers meet. The river here divided the Chinese and British colonies and the two styles of architecture can be clearly seen on either side of the river.

We walked around some more buildings including: the theatre, the Royal Selangor club (where woman are still not allowed in one of the bars) and St Mary’s Cathedral. The whole walking tour was really interesting and gave us a lot of insight into the history behind the country and also the capital.

After this we went back to the city gallery to watch a 3D multimedia presentation about KL. The presentation including a massive model of the city with current and proposed buildings. The proposed buildings were made of clear plastic so it was easy to see how much the city will be changing in the next couple of decades. The presentation then displays information about the cities infrastructure, population, culture etc and highlights these on the 3D model.bit was really brilliant.

Next was a walk to see Jamek mosque. Even though we were covered well we weren’t allowed in, but neither were other guests that were there at the same time. Maybe it was prayer time. We don’t know.

We caught an uber over to little India in Brickfields to have a look around. On our walking tour we had been told that Brickfields was named as it was the site where bricks were made. Quite a literal name. Little India was a bit of a disappointment as we primarily wanted to have some lunch. It was nice to walk around for a bit, but there were only 2 buffet style restaurants that we could find and neither were what we were hoping for.

Instead we walked to Sentral mall and had some traditional Malaysian food which was ok, but not my favourite. I had a curried chicken leg with rice, egg, nuts and some dried fish (wasn’t expecting this) and Simon had mutton curry with rice. I think he enjoyed his more than I enjoyed mine. We caught the  monorail back to near Hard rock to buy our glass and then took some photos of the Petronas towers in the day light. It had been a really busy day so we spent a few hours relaxing at the hotel before the evening.

That evening we met up with Wilson. We met Wilson on the first week of our trip on our Great Barrier Reef liveaboard boat. It was lovely to be able to see him again in our last week. Very kindly, Wilson picked us up and we went for a lovely dinner at a locals spot. Our dinner was a Malaysian dish called Bak Kut Teh, or pork rib soup. It was really tasty and afterwards we enjoyed a sweetcorn and a red bean ice cream. Strangely great.

After dinner we went for a walk around central market and saw some performers on the stage outside. This mall was any shoppers dream, full of really authentic crafts. When then walked around Chinatown, which wasn’t as authentic. I’ve never seen so many cheap and very fake designer bags, purses and clothes.

Our last stop of the night was to the skybar at Traders Hotel. My jaw dropped when we walked in, as the bar was just amazing and the view of the Petronas twin towers was just perfect. You couldn’t have asked for a better view. We enjoyed a few drinks and enjoyed catching up with Wilson.

The next day we headed over to Batu Caves. Batu caves is a limestone hill, with three major caves and a few minor ones. The main cave is a Hindu temple and Cathedral cave, the largest cavern, is full of smaller Hindu shrines and statues. At the base is a large Murugan statue. We climbed up to the main cave first to see the shrines and temple. On the way up, we were given a brick each by the site team. We were happy to help and carry the brick up to the top of the staircase. The inside of the cave was pretty dirty and was in desperate need of some TLC.

We then went into the dark cave and had a 45 minute tour looking at the rock formations and learning about all of the animals that call this cave home. We saw a few tiny millipedes, a large centipede and some spiders. The cave is home to some trapdoor spiders but we didn’t see any of these. A lot of this cave is a conservation zone and has a lot of experiments running, which was interesting to hear about.

After coming out of cave we saw a lot of monkeys running around and being generally naughty.

We headed back to the city by train, went back to collect our bags and then we were on our way to Melaka (Mallaca). Kuala Lumpur had been an unexpected surprise. It would be really interesting to see the city in 10 – 15 years as the amount of development happening there is unbelievable. Let’s hope we get to go back one day and see for ourselves.