Tag: Kuala Lumpur

KL

Little India, Kuala Lumpur

Stopping in Kuala Lumpur seemed like a logical thing to do; we didn’t fancy the idea of many flights in a row and had to fly into somewhere as the starting point for getting back to Laos, so since we know our way around KL pretty well now, and have our regular hotel and restaurants, that’s what we did.  One of the main things we were looking forward to was eating our favourite Masala Dosai that we’ve found so far – in a little restaurant very near to our hotel.  We managed to do that once per day over the 3 days we were there.  We also found our new favourite Assam Laksa place, conveniently right next door to the Masala Dosai place, so we reckon we’ve got it completely sorted now!  We decided to do our usual KL activity and see a movie in the Petronas Towers, and also paid a visit to Little India, where we have been briefly before but have never explored so much as we did this time.  Overall it was nice to just chill out and do not much at all, which was exactly what we had wanted in KL.

Little India, Kuala Lumpur

Visa run veterans

This time we decided to do our visa run to Malaysia on our terms.  Last time if you recall our minibus off the island to Trang was 2 hours late, the seats we had paid for had been given away by the driver to his friends and we missed connections because of it!  Originally we were going to spend this month in Malaysia, but life on Koh Lanta is too good so we have decided to stay here a bit longer.

So we took our motorbike to Trang, a few hours south of here.  It was going to be way too hard core even for us to ride all the way to Malaysia (especially on our little, old, crappy scooter), so we got the bus from Trang and then the train from Hat Yai to KL.

We didn’t actually take any photos in Malaysia, instead we went to the movies.  3 times in one day!  (Since the Petronas towers in KL are now our official movie viewing place in all of SE asia!)  And then came back, riding the bike back from Trang.  We were exceptionally lucky that on the way there, it was mainly cloudy so we didn’t fry in the sun, and then on the way back we rode into the sunset for most of the way, then we got hit by a tropical storm that seem to have become pretty common in the last week or so, lucky we brought our raincoats!  After the rain stopped and we figured out we weren’t lost it was pretty fun winding the little Mio up to max speed in the swirling mist.  After last time, we learned a lot about how not to do visa runs, so this time was comparitively a breeze. :-)

So if anyone wants to do a visa run to Malaysia from the south of Thailand, just ask us we are now self proclaimed experts….just dont ask us for directions out of Trang city, not even Google maps could help us there!

Kuala Lumpur

View our location map in Kuala Lumpur

We have really enjoyed our time in Malaysia, it is a really interesting blend of modern vs old, east meets west, organised and crazy Asian madness.  There are road rules (something we had almost forgotten existed after Indonesia), traffic lights, fast internet, ancient temples, crumbling buildings, people fasting for Ramadan, and people eating themselves silly.  The multi-cultural society has been fascinating to watch and be a part of.  Kuala Lumpur itself hasn’t really inspired us – we didn’t really expect it to though and that’s why we’re only here for a day (unavoidable due to train and flight times).  Petronas Towers are really impressive – more so than we thought they’d be, and the public transport is abysmal.  We did manage to pick an awesome little hotel though and overall KL wasn’t a bad place to spend a day.  Although we haven’t seen much of Malaysia (yet), it seems to be a really good balance of mod-cons, and slow-paced chilling out.  We’re definitely looking forward to next time we’re here and exploring a bit more.