Malaysia – Kuala Lumpur

I had a rather stressful transition at Doha because my plane took off and landed late. Doha is huge so that involved a lot of running. Anyway I made it and met Tatjana looking as cool as a cucumber.

We reached KL (Kuala Lumpur) at around 8.am in the morning. Now I had already prepared and down loaded ‘Grab’ which is a bit like Uber and very much the thing to do to get around, I also had downloaded an e-SIM so were all set to go whizzing around the town! However our bags were not and we waited 2 hours for them.

I have been to Malaysia before, in my mid 20s and I remember then, we got off the plane about 10 pm and went night clubbing. Not these days!All I wanted was to lie flat!

Anyway first impressions of KL, hot and humid, very modern, lots of high rises and lots of cars. Despite this it is relatively clean, well by comparison to Kathmandu it definitely is.

After a short rest in our hotel we headed out to one of the tourist hotspots for something to eat, Petaling Street Market. I think Tatjana and I were much of the same mind, it was a market and neither of us are shoppers so it was all a bit much but we did try some of the street food, a sort of banana leaf parcel with sticky rice, meat, mushroom and chestnut in it, mmm very tasty!

We also went to place where they just sell Durian fruit, all different varieties. If you don’t know what it is, it is a fruit that is edible but has a strong and for me (and a lot of people) a horrible sewage smell. It is banned in a lot of hotels and public places because of this. The fruit inside has a sweet jelly like texture if I remember rightly and seems to be addictive to some people too.I wasn’t up to it so I settled for a fresh coconut water instead.

Then we strolled about this older area of the town that is as slowly being eaten up by modernisation or just gently being taken over by plants.

We ambled along, needing to keep upright and walking because we would start to nod off if we stopped.

Kuala Lumpur means ‘muddy confluence’ and I will mention the history later but, on the first day we encountered ‘River of life’ which was muddy l with the odd dead fish floating down river. We were flagging, it was spitting with rain as we tried to follow the river towards our hotel but much of it disappeared under buildings!

So it seems walking in KL is not the done thing! It is not set up for walking at all and later we were to find the public transport does not link up very well either which meant a Grab car ride was the only option especially when we found we could not cross a busy road, without walking miles.

We found a restaurant in a rather gentrified area and had our first taste of Malaysian food.

As we were waiting for the ‘Grab’ to take us to our hotel the fireworks started! We had arrived in Malaysia within the Chinese New Year (which is 15 days long).