Tall Tales!

We had to leave the country! We both have six month tourist visas for Thailand, but one of the curious conditions is that they’re only valid for a sixty day visit at a time. I’m not too sure of the logic of this – maybe it’s to deter people entering as tourists and seeking long term work. Anyway, we had to leave to get a fresh passport stamp and were excited at the options around us. We settled on Kuala Lumpur as an easy four-day option. We also hoped to catch up with some ex-Dubai friends now living there, but as it happens there were on vacation in Phuket and so we caught up with them there a few days prior!

I first visited Kuala Lumpur, or simply “KL”, as a teenager. I think my mum wanted my sister and I to experience backpacker-type travel to set us up for future independent travel and we had a couple of such trips around easy-to-travel-around-Malaysia. Back in my teenage years we stayed in the bustling Chinatown area – I still remember the sizeable crack in the wall in our budget hotel – but also the high energy buzz typical of a big Asian city.

Helen and I too tried to expose our kids to budget friendly travel when we realised that a privileged Dubai expat life was proving a bit extravagant for their upcoming lives as uni students. We realised this when one of the kids – best remain nameless – would ask “how many stars?” whenever we asked if she wanted to join us for a weekend away!

In our new cost-conscious lifestyle, we are back to budget friendly. Helen maintains one stipulation though – no shared dorms! Though she claims that is to protect other occupants from my snoring as much as the annoyance of suffering theirs. The closest we got to shared dorms was one of the overnight bus trips in India – separated only by a thin curtain from our neighbouring travellers, it was hard to ignore the sounds of farting and snoring for much of the night. You can read about our inland travels around southern India here… Tamil Nadu – Exploring South India Part 1 – Ripening Nicely

At first glance, KL has a lot in common with Bangkok. Both are huge, bustling, ‘in-your-face’, car dominated cities – the traffic in both cities is terrible and neither are pleasant walking cities. I was surprised on visiting Bangkok last year to see that there is not just one, but two quite separate public transport rail systems (MRT and BTS), poorly linked and each requiring separate tickets. Not to be out done, KL has four! (MRT, Komuter, LRT and monorail). It seems like a remarkably inefficient way to use resources to move people around, but I guess that’s a reflection on just how quickly these cities have developed. We got around with a combination of public rail and walking.

KL was a regular weekend escape when I was living in Singapore over twenty years ago – my first architect job after completing my degree. Like many, I found Singapore to be quite a sterile place and after a few months living and working there I would yearn to visit somewhere with more… “grit”. At that time, the night train would roll out of Singapore at about 10pm, allowing you to get a plate of noodles and a pint of sleeping juice before boarding. The train was pretty slow but it arrived in KL in good time for a roti chenai street food breakfast. This is deliciously greasy bread that somehow is simultaneously crunchy and chewy, eaten with a curry sauce. It’s cooked on a flat plate with so much oil that the rule of eating roti chenai is to not watch them cook it until you’ve already enjoyed yours!

By brushing your teeth and splashing water on your face, together with the excitement of waking up in a city, you could power through a day of tourisitng without your body noticing you’d had a disturbed nights sleep on a train!

My parents always talked about “travelling to eat” (I just miss-typed that as “eating to travel”, which may also be a valid approach!), which together with quite a bit of travelling (and eating…) over the years may have contributed to me always being a couple of kilos above my target weight.

The food in Malaysia is amazing – there are three cultures (and cuisines) which at times seem to be competing for your palate’s attention. Even after one of those train station roti chenai breakfasts contained “a little extra Malaysian grit” landed me in hospital with hepatitis A in my younger days didn’t put me off Asian street food.

On our recent visit to KL we didn’t realise that we arrived on the last day of the Chinese New Year celebrations, so we were well placed staying in Chinatown to see the fireworks dispelling bad luck and evil spirits. All very charming, until it was time to try to sleep! The street outside our hotel contained scores of cafes, bars and food stalls. We were enjoying a late night snack as it dawned on us that the sound of firecrackers that had been some way in the distance was getting closer and closer. Somewhat ironically, Helen had just wandered off to find a shop selling ear plugs when the end of our street, just 20 metres from where she was, erupted into our own personal firecracker display. It seems that the rule was the firecracker display would move street by street, with each one trying to out-bang the previous.

We didn’t really have any plans for our trip, but an unexpected bonus was visiting the new skyscraper “Merdeka 118”, which has recently been awarded the title of the world’s second highest. It’s been over three years since I worked as an architect and I really miss the workshops, consultant interaction and site visits. I like to think I’m quite well networked so I decided to try out my old networking approach and was pleasantly surprised how effective it was. After a couple of messages back and forwards with a well-respected structural engineer contact and friend, I’d managed to secure an invitation to tour the project and visit the not yet completed 566m high observation level. It ended up being the surprise highlight of the trip – the tower itself of course – but also meeting contacts of our mutual friend.

It was nice spending a few days in a city as interesting as KL, but both of us were looking forward to getting back to a slower pace of life on board. In India we spent most our pre-covid time travelling inland and using the boat as a base – here we spend most of our time travelling on water with infrequent land visits, so the KL trip was a good opportunity to have our feet firmly on dry land for a few days. In truth, we probably wouldn’t have made the trip without the 60 day re-entry rule for our Thai visa so with our new visa entry stamped in our passports we already have the next trip scheduled for exactly 60 days’ time.