Relaxing in Kuala Lumpur

When we made our original list Kuala Lumpur wasn't a place we picked.  Frankly neither of us had any idea what was there, and I think we may even have had to look up what country it was in - shame on us.  It turns out though, that KL, along with Bangkok, is one of Air Asia's bases, and so if we wanted to do Bali from Hong Kong, that was the way to go.  Not wanting to waste an opportunity, we booked ourselves in for a couple of days just for a taster. 

It turns out KL is really cool.  The buildings are incredible - the Petronas towers being a prime example of this, but it's all set among palm trees, parks and public paddling pools.  Having googled 'things to do in Kuala Lumpur', we had a couple of things on the list - the towers, and a place called Batu Caves, though given the amount of sight-seeing we'd done in the first couple of weeks, and the cockroach incident the night before, we were ready for a rest before we headed out on our first day. 

First stop, Petronas Towers.  We went along to see what the deal was on getting tickets to go up to the sky bridge - it turns out you have to get up super early and queue to get tickets, as there is a limited amount per day.  Boo.  That's us up at six tomorrow then.  We wandered around the gift shop for a bit, and around the super-cool designer shopping centre at the bottom of the towers... Chanel, Bvlgari, Armani you name it, we can't afford it... so we went for ice cream (are you seeing a theme?) 

We then wandered to the public park to get some pictures with the towers, and to have a paddle.  We were both loving Malaysia.  32 degree heat, humidity that's like a big warm hug, particularly in comparison to Beijing's icy bitchslap.  The following days, played out pretty much the same.  We got up early Sunday morning to queue for the towers - I was incredibly tired having stayed up far too late hunting for hotels in Bali and failing miserably due to rubbish wireless.  I quite fancied going home for a nap when we'd booked our tickets, but timing wise it worked out better if we went to see Avatar earlier in the day rather than later.  We were quite fortunate in Malaysia, that English is practically an official language.  We went to watch Avatar in English with Malay and Chinese subtitles.  Amusingly they didn't subtitle the bits being spoken in Avatar in English, so we kind of had to guess the plot at that point - we enjoyed it anyway, even though I had to take a little nap in the middle.  Might get it on DVD when I get back...

We then went up the Sky bridge - the majority of the tour was security checks, and watching a 3D film about Petronas - which I unfortunately failed to nap in.  It was worth it though - the views were amazing, and I'd have liked much longer than the 10 mins we had up there.  I think they should get a bar or something.

We had another lie in on our last day, Monday.  We had planned to go to the caves, however we decided for a number of reasons, mainy laziness and money that we couldn't be bothered.  It was basically a temple with monkeys and hundreds of stairs.  We've seen both monkies and temples and climbed hundreds of stairs, so we decided to give it a miss, seen as it was never on the official list, and headed back to the shopping centre to get some pics of the towers in the dark... and perhaps for an ice cream - you never know. 

KL was just what we needed after China.  It was warm, and we were lazy and caught up on some sleep, and it had good ice cream.  We headed back out to the airport on Tuesday bound for Bali... and we could not wait!