Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
24th-26th October 2014
After a lot of debating over whether we should stay in Singapore and work we finally decided to continue on our way, with the comforting thought that we could always return. We got a coach from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur that took around six hours, maybe more. The coach was actually really comfy with seats you could basically lie down in and that had buttons that when pressed started a massager in the chair. Much more desirable than the English mega bus!
Here is Elise demonstrating just how comfy the coach was 😎
Having just been in Singapore, a highly developed and clean city, and before that being in rural Indonesia, Kuala Lumpur came as a bit of a disappointment. Looking back, I do just think we just weren’t in the right mind frame to really appreciate KL. And on top of that whichever place followed Singapore would have a hard time impressing us! The main issue I had was that it was somewhere in the middle of under developed and developed and it just didn’t seem to have a strong identity of it’s own. However having said that KL is currently undergoing a lot of changes and it’s clear it has high expectations for itself by 2020, the year all the work should have finished. Furthermore our hostel being pretty grim didn’t help matters, especially when one morning Elise and I woke up with a cockroach in the bed, directly inbetween us!!!
On the Saturday we decided to do the ‘hop on hop off’ tour bus. I think this was a good call on our part! We went all around KL getting off at the stops we wanted to. Firstly, we saw the royal palace which was a beautiful building and had grenadier guards outside it, so basically the Malaysian version of Matthew! After that we went to a butterfly sanctuary then had food at the bird sanctuary. We had a few stern looking birds watching us as we ate which was rather unsettling but also very humorous! After that we mainly stayed on the bus to see the sights such as the twin towers, which were actually pretty impressive. Our final stop was at Times Square, a humungous shopping centre with over seven floors and a roller coaster inside. In there we decided to do the Escape room. Our rooms were Alice in Wonderland themed and we were given 45 minutes to crack the codes and get out of the room and escape. I realised that you need a lot more collective common sense than we had and definitely more people to be able to crack it and get out in time! Although we unfortunately ran out of time we did have a lot of fun trying to escape.
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On the Sunday we met up with a group of young people Elise’s pastor had told her about. They’re a group of six and are from Hope City church in Sheffield and are over in Kuala Lumpur to start up a new church! We met them at another church called City Harvest as every Sunday they go to other services at different churches to see what they’re doing and talk to them about their plans. This was definitely my highlight of Kuala Lumpur. The people were really inspiring to talk to, as they had all just uprooted their lives in England and fully dedicated themselves to this cause! They were so welcoming and friendly and ironically in awe at our backpacking plans, which seems absurd with their plans! The people from City Harvest were equally as warm and friendly and one of the guys there even gave us a lift back to town, which was so helpful. I’m really intrigued to see how the Hope City guys journey unfolds.
That night we got the sleeper train to Thailand. It took twelve hours to get to the border, and then an extra two hours to get to Hat Yai in Thailand. From there we got a six hour bus to Krabi, which is where our adventure continues…
A Brit and a Canadian in Asia 