We got dropped off right in the middle of Kuala Lumpur and it was pretty crazy – less road rules than Singapore! Luckily a taxi driver spotted us right away and said it would be 30 ringgit to our hostel. The whole way he had the meter covered with his cap but we never said anything as 30 ringgit is only about £6!
Malaysia seems wonderful as there is such a mix of cultures here! For example, looking on a map, on one street there are two Christian churches on either side of a Confucian School. Then down the road is a Muslim mosque and round the corner is a Sikh mosque. But the best thing is everyone is so nice to each other, it’s great!
It was nearing tea time and the guy working at our hostel informed us we were just around the corner from a big street filled with 50+ restaurants. It’s a great street with the kitchens along the sides and tables and chairs coming into the middle of the street with people bustling about everywhere! There was so much choice but we went for Thai and had a lovely meal. Every night there are singers up and down the street. There was one singer who was a lady in a wheelchair and she just rode up and down all night singing with an amp attached to her wheelchair with a bungy cord. She was our favourite!
After our meal we went and walked across town to see the Petronas Twin Towers. The towers are lit up at night and there is hundreds of people taking photos but it was still pretty impressive to see so close up.
The next morning we got a taxi to the Batu Caves. Here is a 100 year old Hindu temple inside a huge cave. It is the most visited Hindu shrine outside of India. There is an enormous gold painted figure guarding the entrance and to get to the caves you have to walk up a lot of steps!! Along these steps are some very cheeky monkeys that like to hang out and try and steal food from passers by! The monkeys also live inside the cave as the vast walls are covered in trees and greenery.
As it is a temple and Hindu people regularly come to worship and leave offerings, we made sure our shoulders and knees were covered. They also ask people to take off shoes if possible so we did. The ground was very wet but quite warm so it was pretty obvious we were probably walking through a lot of monkey wee!!!
Inside the cave is beautiful! There are a few shrines which have incense burning and people can be seen praying here. It is very peaceful inside even though there were a lot of tourists about!
Every now and the the peacefulness was disturbed by the odd grumpy monkey throwing his coconut away! The monkeys were very funny! They like to chase each other around and at one point they all descended from the high up trees and there were a few females with tiny babies clinging on to them! As they see so many humans every day they are not bothered but you still have to be wary and remember they are wild animals! We saw one monkey drop a coconut on a woman’s head (which made her cry!) and another woman tried to touch one so it stole her hat and threw it off the side of the cliff!
We got the train back into town from the Batu Caves and our next destination was Petaling Street aka Bootleg Street! It was a pretty impressive display of fake designer handbags, watches, sunglasses etc and it is really funny watching the stall owners trying to get people to buy things. There was a couple of stalls that we got sucked into – a man selling make up seemed to look into my soul and see my lipstick obsession as he came running at me with a box full of lipsticks!! We are not really into designer labels but we managed to find a few nice stalls that sold some really nice regular clothes!
We spent the rest of the day in KLCC park, a really nice little place near the Petronas Towers and then had tea back on the eatery street at a really nice Malay/Thai restaurant!
One of our aims for Asia was to try new things, not eat Western food and experience as much of the culture as possible. On this basis there is one particular food we needed to try. It is everywhere in Malaysia. It is the Durian fruit. This is a Durian:
It looks odd and smells even stranger! And it smells even when it hasn’t been cut open. Like, you can smell is half a mile away. According to some website some people think it smells like a beautiful perfume. Others think it smells like raw sewage. We were the latter. It stinks. But this website had said it tastes like a lovely creamy custard. There are something like over 100 varieties of Durian and they are on every other market stall so we knew we just had to try it. So we went and bought a couple of pieces and found a quiet spot to try it. We had noticed people eating it before with plastic gloves on which seemed a bit odd but we quickly realised why. The smell stays on your hands for hours!! But anyway there we were, hiding in the shadows, Durian in hand. Steve went first. He took a massive bite, then a couple of chews and then the Durian was on the floor and he was trying to get rid of the taste (it doesn’t go!). Next it was my turn. I didn’t even get as far as chewing. It touched my tongue and there was no way it was going any further so that was another piece on the floor. We quickly ran to the nearest stall to get a drink of anything just to get rid of the terrible taste!! I have never tasted raw sewage, but I think the Durian is as close as we’ll ever get. But we can at least say we tried it!!
We left Kuala Lumpur the next morning and got the bus to Ipoh, a town a couple of hours north of KL. We met a lovely taxi driver at the bus station and he gave us loads of information about what we could do in the area. He also told us that whilst the rainy season technically finished in December, due to climate change it rains every day in January too. With that in mind we decided we would drop our bags off and go straight out to have a look around town. We must have been walking for no more than 5 minutes when the heavens opened and we were drenched! We turned back to the hostel to get out waterproof coats and then had a second go at our walk. We went to the part of town known as Little India in hopes of finding a lovely Indian restaurant but it was not to be. We quickly found out that Ipoh was a bit of a neglected town, like it had once been a really exciting town full of tourists and now was a bit forgotten. The monsoon weather didn’t help either so we went back to our hostel for a bit. There was a French couple staying in our room and we got chatting with them a bit – we found out we are doing the exact same route through Malaysia!
The next day the rain had cleared up. The French couple told us that they had heard the rain starts at 3pm every day so we wanted to get out early and do as much as possible before the rain. We got a taxi to the Perak Cave Temples (a few miles north of the town). The taxi driver was nice and told us for just 50 ringgit he would wait for us for an hour and take us back into town. The cave temple here is much much smaller than the Batu Caves but very different. The inside of the cave is filled with gold statues everywhere and beautiful paintings on the wall. There are some steps which lead up to the top of the cave and out onto the hillside. You can climb further up the hill to a spectacular view of the town and the temples are located at the top of the cliffs.
After exploring the inside and outside of this temple we went back to our taxi driver. I noticed a couple of monkeys so we went over to them. I was a bit wary so stood back a bit. Steve and the taxi driver got quite close to the smaller monkeys playing in the trees. Mother monkey was watching them carefully and obviously thought they had got to close. Suddenly she bared her (huge sharp) teeth and started chasing after Steve and the taxi driver! It was like a scene out of planet of the apes! The taxi driver managed to scare it away in the end but I have never seen two people move faster and once they were at a safe distance we all had a good laugh about it. The taxi driver told us that he was actually really scared at the time because those monkeys can do a lot of damage when they want to! Steve already had a mars bar in his pants at this point…
The calm before the storm!!
Once we were safely back in town we went on a walk through the Old Town (pre war part of town) as there is a street art walk. The artwork was absolutely fantastic and we got to see some really quirky little streets and shops.
We found a really nice cafe for lunch and coffee and our French roommates appeared too while we were eating. We told them the monkey story and they were pretty glad they didn’t go to the temple.
We spent the rest of the day looking around town – there was Japanese Gardens that we walked to only to find that they hadn’t been maintained for a very long time. We got to see turtles swimming in the pond there but that was about as good as it got. It was past 3pm at this point and we’d been dodging a huge black raincloud for a while, always walking away from it. We made it back to the hostel without getting wet at all which the French couldn’t believe as they had been caught out for the second day!!
That evening we walked through the New Town and found an amazing Indian restaurant (funnily enough not in Little India!). The food was so beautiful and we were given complimentary dishes! The staff were fantastic and it all came to less than £15! We were so chuffed with it but unfortunately as we had been eating the rain had come back with a vengeance! We had a 30 minute walk back to the hostel in very heavy rain and the French were over the moon when we came back to see that we had finally gotten soaked that day! As we reflected on our couple of days in Ipoh we realised that if you put the effort into going out, taking a long walk down the side streets and looking for interesting places, it will pay off but it isn’t the place to be if you want things to do instantly on your doorstep.
We got a bus from Ipoh to the island Penang. We stayed in a really central location in Georgetown near to Little India (this one actually had Indian restaurants!!). After we dropped our things off at the hostel we explored the area. There was a lot of street art to see and we walked down Armenian Street which is known for its interesting little shops. Then we went to Chew Jetty where market stalls are set up along the jetty. It’s a very interesting place and is really busy. It is just another typical Malaysian town that is bursting with a big range of cultural influences.
That evening, we were strolling the streets looking for somewhere to eat when Steve grabs me and starts frantically pointing at a man just in front of us. It turned out to be one of the guys who was in our hostel in Singapore! Such a small world! Steve went and tapped on his shoulder and when he turned round Steve was waving at him like a mad man! I think he first thought he was being mugged or something! After he realised it was us we got talking a bit and we ended up going out to dinner with him. He’s a great guy from France called Guillaume and he’s done quite a bit of travelling around South East Asia in the past so he had some great tips and advice for us. We had a really nice evening and none of us could believe we’d bumped into each other.
The following day we went to Penang Hill. There’s some lovely walks at the top and there’s a great view but the main attraction is the train ride up to the top. The train is a funicular train (a pair of trams/trains running up and down a steep slope on a cable system with the trains counterbalancing each other going up and down). The track is almost 2000 metres long and the journey takes around 5 minutes but it is incredibly steep! It was a fun ride to the top, but a bit scary as we were in the bottom carriage!
When we got to the top we went on one of the nature walks. We saw some Dusky Leaf monkeys which are more rare than the ones we had already seen and were all black with white patches around their eyes. We also saw the Oriental Giant Black Squirrel, a few Asian butterflies, some dogs and the biggest spiders we have ever seen!! The spider webs had a diameter of about 2 foot and the spider was probably as big as Steve’s hand.
We enjoyed our day at Penang Hill and getting the Penang Hill Train back down was even more nerve wracking than getting it up. We were in the front carriage and the train goes pretty fast so it was a little scary looking at our impending doom!! Obviously we made it to the bottom safe and sound but it was a very different experience!
Later that night we decided to have another go at some local food. This time it was a pastry shop we had been recommended. We had some mango and pineapple parcels, Malaysian egg custard and wife cakes. They were all absolutely beautiful we just made sure we avoided the durian flavour ones!!
We woke up early as we had booked a ferry leaving Penang at 2pm and we wanted to see a bit more of the island before leaving. We got a bus to go and see Kek Lok Si, a Buddhist temple. Whilst sat on the bus we noticed a familiar looking man at one of the bus stops and it was only Guillaume again!! Everyone must have thought we were mad as we were driving past waving at him!
When we got to the temple it was stunning. Everything was gold and incense was burning everywhere.
It was very quiet and very peaceful! There are a few different sections with different meditation rooms. At the very top, there is a huge statue of Buddhist icon Guan Yin. She is seen as a mother over devotees and compassion embodied. There are many legends of her rescuing people in times of need.
At the end we went and fed some tortoise that live here. They live in what is known as the ‘Liberation Pond’ and Buddhists believe saving these tortoise (probably from being eaten) and bringing them to this pond is a gesture of compassion and is basically good karma. The temple provides proper food (kangkung) for them that you can buy so they aren’t eating bad things and their water isn’t being polluted.
It was a lovely morning but we had to get back into town as we had a ferry to catch. The ferry journey was about 3 hours long and took us to the island of Langkawi. This is just off the North East of peninsula Malaysia near the Thai border.
It is a beautiful island and still seems to be very much in the process of being built up. We were staying a 20 minute walk away from the main touristy part which was nice because we could walk in and have a nice coffee and have a look at all the market stalls and then we could also get away from the hustle and bustle and get some peace and quiet near our hostel.
The tourist beach is rammed full of things. Sun loungers line the whole beach and there are hundreds of different water sports and activities to do. Our hostel was a couple of minutes walk away from another beach which was much much quieter – probably about 10 people altogether.
The water is so warm it’s like being in a bath. The only slight problem was that there were jellyfish living in the sea but there was one section which had netting around to stop the jellyfish getting in so it was safer to swim in. I still saw a jellyfish in this section but Steve keeps telling me it was a plastic bag. It was a jellyfish!! We saw a few that had been washed up on the shore and one was huge!! We also saw a few crabs, a dead piranha (maybe), an eagle and a mantis. The mantis was about to get washed into the sea so we saved it and put it by a tree. The beach was so beautiful and after tea we went back at sunset which was beautiful too. We loved Langkawi, mainly because it wasn’t too touristy. There was a LOT of hotels being built up near where we stayed so in a couple of years it will probably be more busy but it is still a beautiful island.
After our Langkawi trip we got a boat back to the main land. This boat was to Kuala Perlis which is right on the Thai border. From here we got a 9 hour bus all the way back to Kuala Lumpur. It was actually over half the price to go all the way back to KL, stay a night there and fly out of the capital than it was to fly from Langkawi!! We didn’t mind as we were more than happy to have another night in Kuala Lumpur.
Sadly our time in Malaysia was up. We’ve had an amazing time zipping between towns and islands and everywhere has been great. Malaysian people are so lovely and friendly and it’s an extremely safe place. Anyway it is onto an Air Asia flight to see what Cambodia has in store for us now!
Over Rock and Under Tree 