Kuala Lumpur

As mentioned in our previous post, we never intended to see Kuala Lumpur on this trip but since our flights brought us through there, we decided to make the most of the opportunity and spend a few days checking out the Malaysian capital.

KL, as it’s known locally, is quite a bit more cosmopolitan than we’ve been used to in recent weeks. It has plenty of large skyscrapers, nice parks, shopping centres, restaurants and coffee shops and is a bit more expensive than our recent destinations (but still cheap compared to Ireland). After spending a week in smelly Semporna, we decided to relax our budget a bit and enjoy a few days of relative luxury before heading back into Thailand.

There is not actually that much to do in KL apart from shopping and checking out the sights, but we found the city centre parks to be a great place to just lounge around and chill out. KL is home to some fantastic skyscrapers including the “twin” Petronas Towers (once the tallest skyscrapers in the world) and the KL Tower (the 4th tallest communications tower in the world). We took a tour of the KL Tower right in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was cool watching lightening strike down in different places nearby – we’re surprised the tower itself didn’t get hit given its height. The Petronas Towers themselves are a pretty well known symbol for this region, and we were not expecting them to be so impressive, but they were! Particularly at night time when they were all lit up. You just have to see them to believe us!

By the way, there doesn’t seem to be any recession here.....everywhere we went we saw Job Vacancy notices and the Recruitment sections of the newspapers were packed.