As we struggle to figure out the best pace of travel, we made another mistake by only allowing 3 nights in Malaysia’s biggest city, Kuala Lumpur (KL). We know that after 9 weeks on the road, we have 2 things we are not fond of – 1) travel/transit days and 2) trying to see everything in a city in limited time. Trying to see KL’s biggest attractions is doable in 3 days, but that takes a lot of energy that we are a little bit low on after weeks living in Asia. We stayed right downtown and were within walking distance of most of the big ticket attractions.
I was not ready for the beauty of the city’s buildings. That is not usually something I usually consider when visiting a city, but KL has some of the best architecture. There is the space-needle-like KL Tower. 118 Merdeka is the 2nd largest building in the world. There are a lot of big buildings with multiple towers connected at the top, similar to the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. And the big star of the city is the Petronas Towers, which seems to always be begging me to take another pic of it. We weren’t the only ones – the towers and surrounding area has loads of tourists craning their necks and taking photos.
On our first full day, we took a monorail and then a train outside of town to see the Batu caves. These are Hindu temples built in some rather large caves and is very popular with tourists, especially Indian tourists. We had to climb a huge stairway and avoid curious monkeys the whole way up that were rather feisty because they have been trained that tourists give them junk food. The Hindu temples were pretty cool but it was just super busy, dirty, and hectic.
We came down and then checked out another Hindu temple nearby that we had heard about- the monkey temple. It told the story of Rama the monkey god that helped fight a war or something. I didn’t really follow along with the story even though there were multiple displays of each part of Rama’s life. We were almost alone in these caves and we really enjoyed just the weirdness of the Disney like statues of a Hindu god that were in huge caves.
The next day we decided to check out a bird zoo. I have really been into bird watching and thought it would be interesting even though I couldn’t ethically count them on my “life list” of birds I have seen. Most of the birds were in a huge enclosure that you got to walk through, which led to some birds getting rather close to you. It was a little bit interesting, but we got tired of it rather quickly. And we got hot and tired again (walking around in ~90 degrees with high humidity really saps the energy).
We were then inspired to take a hike the next day so we could see some birds in the wild. There was a park in the city that had a ton of trails so we thought we could get some exercise as well as find some cool birds on a jungle walk. While the park wasn’t very big, the jungle was dense and the trails squiggled all over the place. It was a lot longer walk than we intended because of crazy paths scribbled into a park with only a couple exits. It was fun to feel like we were in a deep jungle only to look up and see a big building poking through the vines. We saw a few new birds but mostly we just got hot and sweaty.
This was our last stop in Malaysia and we feel like we don’t really understand the country that way that we should after being here for a couple of weeks. Malaysia culture is complex; with different ethnicities (Malay, Chinese and Indian), different religions (Buddhist, Islam and Christianity) and decades long European influence from Britain and the Netherlands. We had some great food, met some friendly people, saw some cool things and we feel like we need to come back to see more. We are trying to figure out how to include more of Malaysia in our next Asia trip. Next stop for us – Lombok Island for one night and then Gili Air, Indonesia for 9 nights.