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Friday 27th August - KL
By Claire
Tuesday, 31st August 2004 15:27

We had a bit of a lazy morning as we had nothing much we needed to get up for, and we'd had several late nights and early mornings recently. So it was about 10 by the time we'd had breakfast, and we went into town again. Walking on the pavements here is a hazardous business as all the mopeds who don't want to queue in traffic zoom along the sidewa lks to dodge the cars. The drivers all wear their jackets backwards to keep their shirts from getting dirty. It's funny but I wouldn't laugh at a motorbike rushing towards me on a pavement. We had nothing much we needed to do, but one of our friends had suggested KL was a good place to find an iPod (we still haven't given up) and we had the name of a mall likely to sell one. Getting there involved the cute monorail train and an underground journey too, and with our new-found one-word linguistic ability, we had no problem navigating anywhere in the city. We thought the monorail station looked familiar and then remebered it was probably the one they used in the film 'Entrapment' so we've done film locations here, too!

We got to the mall and found the shop, but the iPods were very, very expensive here. We decided against buying them, and had lunch instead. We consulted the guidebook over a doughnut and sandwich and then thought about booking some bus tickets to see the rest of the country now that we had a rough itinerary. As we were leaving a woman waved at me, then carried on waving when the person behind me went away. I walked over to her and she said that if we hadn't been to the KL tower yet, we should see it today as it was going to be closed for a couple of days due to a festival. I'm always amazed when complete strangers are that friendly!

The KL tower was quite close to the tourist office so we went to the tourist office first. The lady there was very helpful and gave us a map of the country and the city. We tried to book buses to the jungle on Sunday but because of the big holiday coming up (which we didn't know about) everything was fully booked. It made our plans more difficult, and now everything we do has to be on a return to KL basis, but it's better doing it that way than hanging around in town for three more days. So we booked our jungle trip and then went to book the other buses in a bus station at the other side of town. This bus station was a horrible place, very, very dark and hot and so crowded that we couldn't move without knocking someone out of the way. People were shouting to offer train tickets to places we didn't want to go and it was absolutely packed, I got a bit panicky but then I barged through everyone and found the counter we wanted. We bought the tickets and got out as soon as we could. By this time we didn't want to walk all the way to the KL tower and we knew we were going to be back in KL several times, so we just went back to the hostel.

A bit later, after we'd done some internetting and got changed, we went out for supper to a Thai restaurant.



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