Day 57 – Malaysia Day 2 - Off to Kuala Lumpur

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Our flight leaves Penang for Kuala Lumpur at 4:50 so we were pretty lazy this morning and didn’t leave the ship until we had to go to the airport. It was partially because we were lazy and partially because we would have to add another hour to our trip wherever we were going to go to wait for tenders. Again, everyone’s hate for tenders grew pretty quickly. It’s somewhat hard to find a taxi for 5 people because they claim that police will pull them over if they have too many people in their car. I’m not sure if I believe them or not though because every time we say we need 5 they first say no, then immediately after just add 5 ringgits to their previous quote for a ride.

We had a little dilemma when we wanted to leave the ship because they decided to have a ship drill during when we wanted to leave, so we couldn’t get our passports from the pursers desk and couldn’t leave the ship because the tenders stopped running for 1.5 hours while this was going on. It almost made us late for our plane, but we did end up making it in time. Security was pretty quick at the airport, basically just walked through a metal detector and got a pat down and that was it. We flew an airline called AirAsia, which was pretty cheap even though it should be for the 40 minute flight to KL from Penang.

Once we arrived in KL we had to take a bus to the actual city. None of us had any clue how far the airport was from the actual city. We could have either taken a taxi for 150 ringgits which would take about 45 minutes or a bus for 15 ringgits that would take 1.5 hours. The choice was easy. Our total round trip time, from when we left the ship to go to the airport, wait for our plane, fly, then get to our hotel from a bus was just as long as it would have taken for us to hop on a bus from Penang to KL. It would have been about a quarter of the price as well. There wasn’t really any way that any of us could have known this, especially with our limited internet abilities to do research on it. But for future reference, if any of you are going from Penang to KL, or the other way around, just take the bus :) it’s just as long and cheaper.

The bus did take us to right in front of our hotel, The Impiana. It’s a nice 4-star hotel located literally two blocks from the Petronas towers, the 2nd largest buildings in the world. You may remember it from a James Bond movie a few years back. I forget exactly which one but he crosses the two towers by climbing below the skyway or something. The Impiana is probably the nicest hotel that I’ve ever stayed in. It was pretty cheap as well, especially when you split two rooms between 5 people. They had fast internet, a beautiful view and clean and modern rooms as. A nice 4-star to say the least! We were going to stay at the Ritz Carlton but they were already booked. We could have gotten a room with two double beds for $200 a night, or like $40usd a person which we were all willing to pay to stay in “the 2nd nicest hotel in Kuala Lumpur.”

The area that we’re located in is called the Golden Triangle. It’s just the area around the Petronas towers. (there might be more meaning behind what the golden triangle consists of, but I’m not sure). Once we checked into our hotel and got settled I began a large upload to Flickr for South Africa and Mauritius. I hope you all enjoy those pictures! I even had so much time on the internet that I was able to upload some of my pictures from India. I didn’t upload a whole lot of them though because I haven’t written captions for any of them, and I really want to do that before I upload them because it’s just easier that way. Enjoy all of the pictures though! Sorry the pictures from Brazil got out of order, 95% of the pictures I uploaded from SA and Mauritius should be in order.

So once I got that upload going we walked around golden triangle. We can walk to pretty much anything because of the great location of our hotel. Stores, malls, restaurants are all within a few blocks away. You can see the Petronas Towers the second that you walk outside of our hotel. It’s really awesome. I love modern architecture like that, and I’ve never seen something so large and so beautiful and well constructed. It honestly doesn’t even look real half of the time when I look at it. It just looks more like a drawing or sketch because of the way the outside reflects the light around it and on it. Again, absolutely beautiful/awesome/remarkable/breathtaking/amazing. I loved it (if you can’t tell).

I guess you could say that we were some typical Americans because we ended up eating at the Hard Rock Café in KL. From what I could tell, the menu is exactly the same as ones found in the US. We were all starving so we started off with two nacho appetizers. I’ve been craving good nachos for so long now, and these definitely hit the spot. Crispy chips, melted cheese, salsa, guacamole, beef and chicken, jalapeños. Mmmmm. It was SO good.

Kuala Lumpur is definitely a developed city, a lot more than even Penang. It’s the capital of the country and is filled with skyscrapers across the city, not even just the downtown area, everywhere. We were talking with one of our taxi drivers who had lived in KL for his whole life. He explained that just 20-30 years ago none of these buildings were there. Ever since oil was discovered, buildings have been shooting up. Even looking out from our hotel I counted 5 tall sky scraper type buildings that were being built. It’s amazing what some oil money can do to a country!

We randomly met up with some other SASers that we are friends with from the ship at Hard Rock. They were there on the SAS trip, and they arrived yesterday so they had some good pointers on what we could do tonight and tomorrow. We walked around and got familiar with the area a little longer then headed back to the hotel.