A Day In KL (12/04/10)

This particular morning started off with me being woken up at an ungodly hour by some terrible creature booming its early morning call right outside the hotel room. There was a certain awful irony to this as one of the things I was looking forward to about this holiday was getting away from the sodding blackbird that wakes me up every morning in Tunbridge Wells. Ah well, c’est la vie. At least I had to get up there or there abouts, putting me firmly in the time zone.

Breakfast in the hotel café was a curious affair, at least by my standards. Probably yours too.

There was curry, toast, rice, anchovies, peanuts, sambal, pancakes, porridge, beef strips, and a whole host of other foodstuffs, not all of which were what you’d commonly associate with the first meal of the day. Still, I guess if you’re catering for a constant stream of people who’re not sure what time it is and might be feeling like an evening meal or lunch at that point, and operating in a country where these things are eaten for breakfast, I suppose it makes sense in it’s way.

After breakfast we strolled through the hotel lobby and had a chat with Felix, the jolly man who was responsible for all the transport out of the hotel. He arranged for Edwin to come to the hotel and give us a tour of various points of interest in and around the city.

Edwin seemed a little lack-lustre and unenthusiastic about the whole affair, but this, it transpired, was down to him having done the same tour every day for the last 7 years. It probably gets a bit samey after a while.

So we realised that perhaps he wasn’t going to be that informative or chatty.

First port of call was the royal palace. A gate and some informative placards – took a photo of the gate, read the placards and we moved on. This was just a stop off on the way to the first real attraction – The Batu Caves. A big hole somewhere near the top of a limestone cliff. You get up to it by climbing the 272 steps that are guarded by a huge statue of Lord Murugan. Our guide sort of suggested that this was the tallest statue in the world, which seemed implausible to the both of us. Turns out that it’s the world’s tallest statue of Lord Murugan. Which is cheating a little bit. Still. 42.7m is a big statue by any measure. That’s 3.3m shorter than the Statue of Liberty, for example. And yes, I did look it up on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batu_Caves

So we climbed up the steps and I took a couple of pics of the biggest representation of Lord Murugan’s butt in the world.

Part of the way up are the entrances to the Dark Caves. These seem doubly intriguing, not just because they are the Dark Caves, but because the entrance is sealed and guarded by macaque monkeys.

There are, it transpires, macaque monkeys all over the place and I like a monkey, so I have a huge number of monkey photos from the caves. I’ll post some up here, but if you want to see more, let me know. I don’t really want to inflict that many monkeys on people who aren’t interested.

Up at the top of the steps and into the cave, Vicki almost immediately fixed upon a man with some snakes who was draping them round the necks of visitors for a small fee. She duly paid and I duly snapped. As soon as I get back to England you’ll see what Vicki looks like when she’s in fear of her safety.

Walking deeper into the cave, if it wasn’t already clear it became abundantly apparent that this was a Hindu shrine. This might come across as disrespectful but I assure you it isn’t – I love Hindus for their habit of decorating important places with statues that stray more than slightly into the world of gaudy. Better yet, there’s almost always a story that goes unexplained.

So one respectful wander around the caves later and we started the slow stroll back down, mindful that the steps are somewhat smaller than my unreasonably large feet. 272 steps would be a long and painful descent if done in freefall. 10 would not be that comfortable.

At the bottom we got a fresh coconut to refresh ourselves with before heading on to what was billed as pewter works, but through some confusion turned out to be a pewter shop. With neither of us in the mood for pewter it was a short stop off.

Next leg of this journey was into the heart of KL, and a trip up the Menara KL (aka The Telecoms Tower). Really, very, very tall. It was quite a muggy day, but still we had a good view of the city. Having seen all there was to see from up there, instead of taking the lift down to the ground floor again we took it one floor down to the revolving restaurant and tried to blag our way in, despite not having booked. Sensing the blag, the concierge quoted us a price of 40RM for tea and a slice of cake. This was more than the admission charge so we made our excuses and left, promising to be back after we’d had a word with our driver.

Instead, what we did was wander around the “KL Experience”, pausing very briefly to watch some decidedly untraditional traditional dance.

One thing that this diversion did give us was a clear view of the tower from the base which was the first time we realised quite how massive it is – more than 8 times taller than that statue of Lord Murugan.

Last stop on the tour was the Petronas Towers. Big, shiny and full of shops. I’m sure the architect who designed it and the countless workmen who built it would want it described in more detail and with more reverence, but truth be told, that’s it.

After that it was back to the hotel. Our main task that evening was to meet up with Jude – a friend of Jo’s (Vicki’s sister). We’d not made any significant plans for this and so left it to chance. Chance, it seemed, dragged the three of us to the pool. The remarkable thing was that none of us had met or seen each other before. Jude was on the look out for someone who looked like Jo who appeared to be with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

We swam past all of once before she recognised us.

Introductions made, we went for dinner. After dinner, decided I wanted a little bit of a shower and a quick lie down.

Woke up three hours later at midnight and decided that I wasn’t quite so much in the time zone as I’d thought.