The ride from Rai Lay to KL was a long one. We started by taking an hour boat ride, which led us to a three or four hour mini bus ride. This led us to a town called Hat Yai, Thailand, where we waited four hours with a new German friend for our VIP bus to arrive to take us the remaining 12 hours to KL. We got to KL at five in the morning. Fortunately, our friend already had a place to stay so we were able to leave our bags at his place while we looked for a place. We were searching for what felt like an eternity before we finally landed on a place. It was 9:30 am when we finally checked in to a hotel. I fell on the bed and slept for half an hour exactly in the position I had fallen before I could muster the energy to go the 3 blocks to get our packs. When I finally was able to get up and face the hot day and the walking we would inevitably have to do, we went to the Ragea Mansion, which is where our packs were. On the way, we stopped for some cheap local food. We got a decent portion of food for less than $2 total, and getting a little fuel made all the difference in the world. We got our bags and returned to our hotel, which was right in the heart of Chinatown, and didn't reemerge for about four more hours. I don't know how Dustin stayed awake reading the whole time, but I was out like a light as soon as the A.C. came on and didn't wake up until I was a bit caught up on sleep. We went out to eat and explore the city a little bit using a crappy map we had picked up from on of the hotels when we were trying to find a place to stay. We saw a museum that I could not tell you what was in it, but it was air conditioned, so that was all that mattered. KL is HOT, if you hadn't gathered that already. We saw a giant field with a giant flagpole looming over it.
We didn't see much that first day because it was hot and we were tired. We went in after dinner for another break and went back out to the night market in Chinatown after dark. Booth after booth was selling "authentic" designer handbags, shoes, watches, wallets, underwear, etc. We didn't get much any of that except a watch for Dustin, b ut once we were able to find some stuff for sale that wasn't designer, we got some pretty cool souvenirs.
Our hotel room in KL was really dark with no windows and the only sliver of light coming from underneath the door. Because of adapting to a weird sleep schedule from the bus ride and not being woken up by the sun shine in the morning, we slept until 11 or 12 every days that we were there. Over the course of the few days we were there, we saw KL's twin towers in the Financial district, a little botanical gardens 'with tons of orchids and habiscus (sp?) plants, several museums, the lookout tower (which we didn't go up in) and a ton of tourist attractions that only cost us the energy it took to walk there in the heat. We would eat dinner at around 6 and go in to our hotel - where there was free internet and a really nice cafe restaurant - and read or chill out until it got dark and cool enough to go explore. It was raining buckets and thundering hard with crazy bolts of lightning for three of the four days we were there, so we tool vull advantage of the nice sheltered yet open air cafe there.
KL had a lot of homeless people. I mean more than I have seen in any other major city I have ever been to. They were everywhere. In American cities, as far as I have noticed, there may be a lot of homeless people and maybe they have some mental disorders or addictions that got them where they are but generally I haven't ever noticed too much else. In KL, as well as in many of the other major Asian cities we have been to, 90% of the people begging for money or sleeping on the street have some kind of visible physical disability, whether it be missing hands, deformed feet, hunched back, disfigured legs, etc. I definitely got the impression that there was no system put in place to help people like this with severe disabilities that were unable to work or feed themselves in any way other than begging, and if there was, maybe it was very expensive to use and most of the people in this condition would not have been able to afford it.
Overall, we had a good time in KL. It wasn't our favorite place, but that is no fault of the city itself. We just prefer smaller towns and a better landscape than a skyline filled with skyscrapers. When we woke up at 11 on our fourth day in KL, we talked about whether we should go to Melaka that day or stay in KL one more day. We had pretty much exhausted the main tourist attractions and so we made a spur of the moment decision to move on to Melaka. We walked to the metro station, took about half an hour to get past the confusion of two people who never use a metro, and took it to the bus station. There were buses leaving for Melaka every hour. We got there at 2:25 and the bus was leaving at 2:30, so we were just in time and it was an easy, short ride there without a hitch!
Catch the next post to read about Melaka, one of our favorite towns so far!
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