I'm not sure if I have any pictures of the Grand Central Hotel - one of those excellent hotels that has fallen on hard times but still manages to run a good if faded service. Fabulous deco ceiling & chandelier in the lobby. Carpet probably not updated since about the same time.
There is a lot of fantastic food in KL, in fact in Malaysia in general, and there is really no need to pay more than 12 ringgits ($4) for a fantastic meal. In fact we ate plenty for around 5 or 6 ringgits and every Indian restaurant has something for about RM1.50 if you are not super hungry. The strange thing is the beer is more expensive than the food, by some margin - we had two bottles of beer the first night & they were more than half the cost of the meal (for four people). Maybe as an Islamic state, Malaysia feels taxing beer is a virtuous thing to do.
Monday was the tourist day for us before flying to Penang for the dragon boat championships. We started with a walk to the elevated railway through the early morning red light district (according to the Lonely Planet - their Asian reviewer really doesn't like Asia) which was (unsurprisingly) pretty quiet.
The elevated railway (there are two, I think) was a really good way to see a lot of stuff quickly because if runs in a semicircle from the North West to the South West. You quickly see mosque - Buddhist temple - cathedral - mosque - Hindu temple - Buddhist temple - cathedral - mosque, which give you a pretty fair idea that Malaysia might be a tricky place to govern. I suspect recalcitrance is not an optional extra for their politicians. You also see modern building, colonial buildings, building of unknown provenance and lots of terrace housing. Bits of KL could be mistaken for Newtown (more true of Georgetown in Penang). A very popular strategy for the locals is a business on the ground floor and a house on the 1st & 2nd floor. Not just in KL, we saw the same thing all over Penang & also in Ipoh and Talan Rata (of which more later).Fortunately for me Liz is a wizard with a map, but unfortunately for us the KL roads department is a wizard at creating uncrossable roads. Fortunately for all of us (Liz and I were travelling with Sergio & Kathryn, two other paddlers) Sergio doesn't understand what uncrossable means.
The elevated railway dropped us off at Sentral, but crossing the road behind Sentral - which was essential to actually get anywhere from Sentral on foot - only takes you as far as a carpark. Eventually the carpark takes you to the lobby of a 5 start hotel which you can stride through in a "we own this place" kind of way, and that takes you to the edge of a four leaf clover 8-lane highway exit, on the other side of which you can see the national Museum - our notional destination.
I haven't mentioned the weather yet. It isn't as bad as Guangzhou is the only good thing that can be said about it. Sane people wouldn't be trying to cross a major highway system in it. Still, that didn't stop us - Sergio noticed a couple of locals wending their way across unmarked paths and down afterthought stairways so we followed them (pausing regularly to let the traffic pass) and eventually arrived at the Museum. The museum was closed, because it was Monday. Never mind, we set off for the Observatory. Closed, due to it being Monday. Undaunted, we set off for the butterfly farm. It was a lot further than it appeared on the map, but it wasn't closed on Monday. On the way we had coffee at the coffee shop at the monument to Malaysia's first PM. The coffee shop wasn't closed, because all the monument employees need somewhere to meet and chat on Mondays, since the monument is closed.
The other thing we discovered on the way to the butterfly farm was the orchid garden - this is the fountain at the top. The orchids were stunning - possibly for the first time I saw why people go slightly mad about them, but I failed dismally to wotk out the macro function on the camera and all the pictures turned out blurry. Except this one.
The butterfly farm needs someone with more patience than me - it is very had to look at butterflies because they don't really stop to be looked at - or photographed.I can see why people who claim to be butterfly lovers kill them, because you won't ever get much of a relationship going with a live butterfly. Of course, it might be nicer to wait until they die of natural causes some time in the next 48 hours, but for some reason people don't seem to do that.
For me the highlight of the butterfly farm was the turtle pond. Not that the pond seemed to interest them much, sunbaking was all the go. It looked like the two turtles on the left were objects of interest - the other turtles made occasional, and in some cases quite serious, albeit unsuccessful, attempts to join them - but I couldn't work out what the attraction was.When I had a turtle, my book on turtle care said they shouldn't be left out in the sun, but obviously these ones hadn't read the book. Perhaps the Malaysian are breeding a special variety of self-cooking turtle? it's a mystery.
From the butterfly farm we caught a taxi to the Central markets - the driver wanted 25 ringgits, but we beat him down to 15, which looked faintly plausible looking at the map. And it might have been if he had gone by road, but he knew a shortcut through, yes, a carpark (a different one) which made me feel 3 ringgits was fairer. Mind you, that's less than the flagfall. Anyway, we wanted lunch and what can you do? It's just economics really.
The markets were OK, in fact a lot of stuff was OK++ but at the beginning of a trip it's not sensible to buy stuff. Furthermore, Liz' luggage couldn't possible have fitted into her bag so even if we had been feeling not sensible there wasn't really room to pack it. Given that it's a tourist - probably disrespectful to say mecca - hotspot, this probably was a fine plan A.
Following an excellent lunch - although it was extremely hard to persuade the waiter we didn't want the Western Menu - chosen largely at random from the wall because I haven't studied Malaysian and that menu didn't have pictures, we caught another train and a subway to the KL thing, the twin towers of the Petronas building.
They are part of a VERY SERIOUS MALL, which had the look and feel of one the luxuriously overstuffed Chinese malls PLUS luxury good whose brand names I had heard of. We could only just afford coffee and cake; OK a bit of an exaggeration but it certainly cost more than it would at any mall in Australia. The airconditioning was also better than at any mall in Australia. Luckily, malls aren't closed on Mondays, but the elevator to the top of the towers was.
I have a word of advice - arrive in KL on Monday night.
Although our hotel was a bit shabby it formed a sort of triangle with the World Trade Centre and an upmarket hotel/mall. We had a bit of a wander through that before dinner - 4 jewellery shops with guys carrying sawn-off shotguns sitting in a chair outside. KL's biggest business is money changing (one money changer every 4 shops) and none of them feel the need for sawn-off shotguns. I guess in a part of the world where to a degree your family jewellery is a significant part of your family wealth/investment strategy it makes sense. But it's a bit disconcerting.
More ordering from menus on a wall in an Indian restaurant absolutely packed with people. Again the beer was the most expensive feature of the meal, which was very good. It was sort of next to a river - I would have called it a drain, but I did see people fishing in it. I don't know how much longer they will be able to afford the rent, as it looks like someone is planning to gentrify the area. Although, now I think about it, it took about 30 years after Melbourne built the WTC before anyone got near gentrifying that part of town, so they may have a few years left.
Take a Malaysian dictionary though - although to a degree everyone in KL speaks some English, and the Indian community probably more than anyone else, they don't use the same translations into English of Indian food as we do in Sydney.
Tuesday we flew to Penang.
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