Malaysia

Thanks to an unusually long Chinese New Year break (the longest most Chinese people we have talked to can remember), we were able to add some bonus destinations to our trip. On our last night in Phuket, we rummaged through our trademark train-wreck of a hotel room, packed our bags and prepared for our early morning taxi to the airport. We had a long day of travel ahead of us and before checking into our next hotel would spend nearly 18 hours of travel by taxi, plane, bus and ferry. The next morning started off with a bang when our 4:00 am taxi didn’t show up until nearly 4:45. Luckily we had prepared for that and still made it to the gate in plenty of time. By 10:00 am we had landed in Kuala Lumpur and were on a bus to the Pudu Sentral Bus Station near the city center. From there we would catch a long distance bus to the small coastal town of Lumut. It was at Pudu Sentral though that we had another stroke of bad luck: our bus had a flat on the way to KL and it would be another two hours before it finally arrived. So our scheduled departure of 1 pm was moved back to 3 pm, and the concern that we wouldn’t make the last ferry from Lumut became a real possibility. After a 4 ½ hour ride, we pulled into the Lumut station with about thirty minutes to spare. After a brisk walk across the street to the pier, we got our ferry tickets and were finally on the homestretch to our next destination, Pankor Island.

Pangkor

As Pangkor is mainly a vacation destination for domestic travellers, I feel like we got a pretty authentic Malay experience with this stop. In fact, we didn’t even see any other Westerners until we rented bicycles and rode to the other end of the island to the main beach. It’s really a pretty small place with not much to do other than relax and enjoy the view, which was totally fine with us. The main beach was only a few miles down the road from our hotel, but due to some intense hills and windy roads, the bike ride over took a few hours. Once we arrived though, we knew it was the place to be. Several restaurants were right on the beach, as well as kayak and snorkel equipment rental. We had lunch and a few drinks and spent the rest of the afternoon just sunbathing and enjoying the view. I even dozed off for about half an hour at one point. Since there isn’t much else to do on Pangkor, we actually decided to head to the same beach the second day, although we skipped the bike ride and just got a taxi at that point. The second day we rented a kayak to paddled around the tip of the cove to another small beach that was completely secluded. With literally the entire beach to ourselves, we just sat and enjoyed the peace and quiet as well as the spectacular view for about an hour before paddling back. That really sums up our time in Pankor. Since we got in so late the first day, it was really just two days of relaxing. The third morning we got up early to make the trip back to Kuala Lumpur. We had much better luck that day with travel and made it to our hotel by around 1:00 pm.

Kuala Lumpur

The Maison Boutique Hotel in KL is by far the coolest hotel we stayed at on the trip, and up there pretty high on best hotels we’ve stayed at ever. The entire hotel has a vintage movie theme to it and for a little extra you can stay in one of several specifically themed rooms. We stayed in a normal room but on our last morning, the manager was nice enough to show us a couple of their more popular rooms. I think she said there are 18 different themed rooms in total, but the ones we saw were the Herbie the Lovebug room (complete with a vintage VW bed) and the James Bond 007 room, which had décor from several of the classic films. It was a very unique idea for a hotel and the whole experience as very pleasant. The facilities were all amazing also and even the continental breakfast was fantastic. Anyway, enough about the hotel.

The morning of our first full day we joined a ‘Hop on-Hop off’ tour bus of the entire city. The bus takes a route around the entire city, stopping at pretty much every major attraction KL has to offer. You can get off at any of the destinations that look interesting to you and skip the ones you don’t care to see. The route takes about 2 ½ hours if you don’t ever get off and stops at around 20 destinations around the city. It’s a pretty great way to see the whole city in one day. The stops we chose to make were Little India, Chinatown (ironic, I know), the Royal Palace, and the Petronas Twin Towers. There were actually a few others we would have liked to stop at, but I started feeling pretty sick around halfway through the tour. I pressed on as long as I could, but by the time we got back to the hotel I was running a really high fever and felt awful. Chelsea had a similar experience in Phuket and we attributed both illnesses to too much sun. In both cases it was just a 24 hour thing and by the end of the following day, we both felt fine. Before leaving KL a few days later, we went back to the national museum and the bird park on our own, both of which were part of the city tour. The national museum was very interesting and we learned a lot about Malaysian history and culture, neither of which we knew much about before the trip. Malaysian culture is a combination of Indian, Chinese, and native Malay who all make one big melting pot all around the country. It’s pretty common to see all three ethnicities wherever you go and examples of each culture is pretty obvious in food, architecture, religion, and dress.      

We had a couple other half-day tours scheduled for the following days. One was a trip to the Famous Batu Caves, which is essentially a huge Hindu Temple. Situated right at the bottom of the 272 step climb to the entrance of the caves is a 140 foot gold statue of the Hindu deity, Murugan. Once inside, there are several cool Hindu shrines with more statues and lots of incense burning. There is also a plethora of monkeys all around the caves, some of which get a little too close for comfort. Some people are way too comfortable getting around the monkeys, especially considering how many end of the world movies start with monkey to human transfer of disease. Of course, I also did some hand feeding of the monkeys in Thailand. The good news is we’ve been back a few weeks already so it seems I won’t be patient zero.

Other half day tour we did was a trip out to an elephant sanctuary a few hours north of KL. It was a very nice facility that rescues elephants who, for whatever reason, can’t survive in the wild. Some were injured and others were just abandoned by the heard from a young age. We got to feed the younger ones peanuts and sugar cane, as well as see some of the adults taking a bath. It was a pretty cool experience. We also spent another half day out at a nature reserve where we got to do some hiking through pretty rugged jungle. The hiking wasn’t particularly challenging but definitely one of the more authentic hiking experiences we’ve had. ‘Trail’ was pretty loosely used at some times as we did a lot of ducking under brush and dodging spider webs. There were markers that we kept an eye on the whole time so we knew we were on the right track. For the most part though it was untouched jungle and very cool to hike through.  

I think that pretty much sums up Malaysia. All together we were in Malaysia about a week and were actually pretty exhausted at that point. We had one more stop to go before heading back to Hangzhou though: Singapore. We would travel by rail from Kuala Lumpur to the city-nation and although it was a slow train that took nearly 8 hours, it was a pretty cool ride through both natural jungle and huge coconut plantations. We had to stop at the border and go through Malaysia’s exit procedure before entering the country, but by mid-afternoon we had started the final leg of our trip.