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KL
By Mikey
Tuesday, 31st August 2004 15:28

The train journey from Singapore to Malaysia was uneventful. The station in Singapore is actually classed as Malaysian territory and we went through passport control before boarding the train. After trundling through Singapore for twenty minutes, we had to get out of the train do Singaporian immigration stuff. Personally I think that's a bit backwards but it seems to work for them so I'm not too worried about it.

There were no egg sandwiches available on the train so I had to chose between the two evils that are sardines and tuna. In the end, tuna was the lesser evil.

We arrived in KL about an hour late and headed straight for a taxi. Even if I hadn't known beforehand, I would have guessed that Proton was a Malaysian make of car, they were everywhere. It didn't take too long to reach our hostel although it was a good job I'd made notes on the directions necessary. The hostel was new and the driver didn't know it. On the way we saw lots and lots of big buildings including the famous Petronas towers.

We stayed a short while in the hostel to cool down and then headed out for a wander. Unfortunately we didn't have a map and so we had no idea where we were going but we spotted the Petronas towers and thought we'd head that way. By the time we were standing just in front of them it was nearly 6pm. Right next door to the towers was a shiny looking mall that we decided might contain some food.

It turns out that Malaysians like shopping too and more importantly, they had a Dunkin' Donuts in the mall. Since it was also quite late in the day, we decided that we weren't going to do anything much until the morning and we should take advantage of the cinematic facilities. Malaysians like the cinema too, although most films seem to get cut a bit. No kissing, sexual swear words or bits encouraging free thought. They don't just bleep the words out either, they cut that bit of film. So, Tom Cruise's Collateral was missing a couple of bits. It was otherwise quite good I thought.

The following day, we got up quite late and decided to go iPod shopping. It turns out that Singapore was cheaper for iPods but Malaysian PowerBooks are much cheaper than UK prices. Having found that out, we had lunch (yes we got up that late) and went in search of the Malaysian Tourist office to see about getting buses to other parts of the country. The buses were easy enough to organise although it seems that we've come at a bad time. There are school holidays on at the moment and a big public holiday next week. So everything's busy and accomodation where we want to go is scarce. That's all organised now though.

On our last full day in KL, we had wanted to visit the Sky Bridge at the Petronas towers. Our guide book said that tours only ran at specific times of the day however, things seem to have changed since then. Apparently we needed to queue for the limited tickets at 8am in the morning and so when we rolled up at a leisurely 12pm, there were none left. Oooops. So we concocted an elaborate plan to come back very, very early one day before one of our bus journeys.

While we were outside taking some daytime photos of the towers, a security guard came over and asked if we had been up to the Sky Bridge. When we said that we hadn't, he directed us to two guys who had tickets that they wanted to sell for a tour in 15 minutes' time. Initially I was sceptical but since they only wanted RM 20 for both tickets (about 3 pounds) we accepted. After a brief problem finding small enough change, we ended up taking a trip up to the 41st floor for a spectacluar view of KL.

We had some lunch in a Malaysian restaurant and feeling a bit tired, went back to our hostel for a while. The while turned into the evening as sometimes happens. We watched a bootlegged copy of The Terminal and that was about it.



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