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Part two…
Next day we packed up and trekked in the blazing heat to catch our next bus to Kuala Lumpur. It's really not fun carrying 21kgs on your back, 10 kgs on your front, wearing flipflops, in 30 degree sun for about a mile!! Thankfully the bus was nice, spacious, cool and journey was quick and easy to KL. Arrived at the Hotel China Town Inn, in the bustling market street of China Town, but luckily our hotel was pretty nice and quiet. Had dinner at a little 'Hawker' restaurant/plastic chairs on one of the stupidly busy streets, but the food wasn't bad. Had a bit of a wander around the market stalls but they were all pretty much the same and the salesmen were very loud shouting you to look at their stuff which puts me off straight away. The next morning we got up bright and early as we were told that if we wanted to be in with a chance of tickets to go up the Petronas Towers (the massive twin towers) then we had to be in line by 8.30am. Arrived a little late at 8.45 to find the tickets were all sold out. Ben asked the lady what time people had to queue to get the tickets…7am :O !!! Er no thanks luv! Got some breakfast and heard Christmas music for the first time - I got a bit sad as definitely gonna miss Christmas at home L We then decided to head for the KL Tower which we found out is actually a lot higher than the viewpoint at Petronas Towers and gets a much better panoramic view of the city. It was a bit overcast so unfortunately didn't get the best views but was still pretty impressive. Next we headed to an Aquarium which was actually really cool, stupidly busy as was a Saturday, and full of pushy as hell Malaysians but there were lots of exciting fishies to see. Yes we found Nemo, and Bruce the Shark while on a conveyor belt through one of those bubble tank thingies!! Ended up back at the shopping complex at the bottom of the Petronas Towers (which was ginormous), got some food and meandered. Next stop was another shopping mall - but an electronics one in the hope of getting Ben a little netbook which we'd been waiting to get for AGES!! A couple of hours and one netbook later we somehow managed to get our weary selves back to the hotel - after 10 hours of walking around we were shattered!!
Day 2 in KL we went to the National Park - saw a couple of museums (no sick this time just severe hunger!!), went to the Planetarium and watched a show about man's mission to space which was quite exciting, finally found a crappy cafeteria and got some food then went to this HUGE walk through bird aviary (Amy Kelsall this place is genuinely your WORST nightmare). There were parrots, peacocks, storks, flamingos and various other poultry flapping about around you and also in cages. The place was very impressive and very big but SOOOO hot and humid!! I got attacked by a flipping massive stork cos I trod on his stupid fish so he attacked my bag and flapped his massive wing VERY close to my face, naturally I screamed like the girl I am and ran away (Amy you would have 'done a Sarah' and just ended it to save more pain!) !! That night we went into Central KL for some decent food as we weren't great fans of the whole 'hawker' plastic chairs on the side of the road thing and had a little nice Italian half way between the two towers - didn't exactly concur with our budget but what the hell we were hungry and in need of some good nosh! Also got some awesome night time shots of the towers and successfully managed to get the standard one each of us in front of them. As per usual as we got off the train at our stop it began to rain again, thought we'd got away from British weather!!
One our last day we set off for Bangsar - an apparently fancier, less chaotic part of KL. We went to the MEGAMALL which was indeed pretty mega!! We were quickly learning that the city of Kuala Lumpur heavily consists of impressive high rise buildings…and hundreds of shopping centres! If you're not a big shopper then it's not really the place for you. Fortunately for us we are massive shoppers so was quite enjoyable, but hard to resist spending however with our heavy and full backpacks in mind we managed to be (quite) good! We had decided that we needed a dose of normality - a break from all the touristy stuff we've been doing for weeks now, and all the walking and sightseeing and shopping, and conveniently within the MEGAMALL was a huge cinema complex that just so happened to be showing the new Harry Potter which Ben was adamant that we were going to see. So we took a break from being backpacking tourists and enjoyed the really quite dark and scary delights of Harry Potter 7. After that we got the shuttle and train back to China Town, (it was raining again) went on a quick hunt for our standard 'travelling bracelets' that we've been collecting from each destination to add to our now quite busy 'travelling arms', got a quick bite in and went back to the hotel to re-pack our hole of a room into our delightful backpacks once more, oh what a joy that task is becoming!
Today we awoke, left our hotel and trekked once again to catch the LRT to the bus stop where we were headed for Singapore. We were slightly nervous about this as we had read that the bus station was a bit of a 'stressful headache' and it certainly lived up to expectations! Dozens of people constantly trying to sell you tickets for their bus, no signs (as we have learnt in Malaysia they aren't great fans of signs, directions or general helpful hints when venturing to different places), and no real sense that anyone knew exactly what was going on or where they should be going. Luckily we had pre-booked our tickets online so after a bit of kafuffle we found our 'platform' and waited for our bus which was late of course. Luckily the journey was much less stressful except one little strange encounter at Singapore border control - as we were filling out our forms this guy started asking Ben where he was from and if it was his first trip to Singapore and as we have naturally learnt to do in such annoying situations - we ignored him…until we looked up and noticed the gun and handcuffs and security uniform…"oh hello sir sorry what were you asking us dear sir *please don't shoot us, please don't arrest us*"?!!! So he asked if we would mind following him for some 'standard procedure questions' which 'wouldn't take long'. So we followed the security man along with 2 other security guys, backpacks, rucksacks and everything with us, went through all sorts of security gates and lifts and locked doors, were told to sit in a room and give them our passports. Now you're probably picturing some seedy backroom that smells of stale coffee and dampness, but it was really modern and very technologically advanced. Nonetheless we were a little nervous, obviously thinking things like 'oh my god someone has set us up, they have planted drugs in our bags, we are going to go to some awful prison and the punishment for drug trafficking is certain death…'. Fortunately for us all we did was get questioned on the nature of our visit and asked several times when we would be leaving their country, got our thumb prints taken oh and Ben got asked about 7 times if I was his wife! Then we were escorted back to our bus full of impatient passengers unimpressed that we'd held them up! When the bus dropped us off in Singapore it was absolutely hammering it down with rain, we're talking torrential soak-you-to-the-bone-in-seconds rain which is always fun with not-so-waterproof-backpacks! Anyway we eventually made it to an MRT station once the rain had subsided a little and got the subway to Geylang where we will spend the next 5 nights - let's hope the weather cheers up a bit!
- comments
Babs Great to read your latest blog, what a lot youhave done since your last one. A bit of a frightening experience on the bus, but glad you have eventually arrived in Singapore. You are right in themidst of the monsson season hence the heavy rain but inbetween it can be very pleasant. Hope you are ok otherwise, talk again soon.