Batu Caves & City sightseeing in KL

 In total we spent 3 days in KL, though the first day was a bit affected by the arrival in the middle of the night. Before going to KL I’d heard from several people that you don’t need to spend many days there because there is not that much to see – and it was true. I’d say that 3 to 4 days are enough. In the first morning we planned to leave quite early but we all felt so tired that we didn’t manage to get up as planned. After we finally got up, we took the train to Batu Caves which is a monkey park with some bat caves. There were quite many tourists besides us. You could feed the monkeys there and they were completely free to play and jump around the area. After a tour in the monkey park, we took a 45-minute guided tour in the ‘Black Cave’ that was the biggest of the caves. The tour did cost 35 RMY (ca. 9€). The guide explained us about the cave’s history, bates living there and the very rare spider species you can find there too.

In the early evening we got back to KL and we went to take a look at the Petronas Towers. If you want to go to the observation area and visit the towers, you have to be there at 8.00am as they allow only a maximum of 1.000 people to visit the towers daily. However, to have a better view at the city I’d recommend to go to the KL Tower which is higher and provides a nice view at the Petronas Towers and the rest of the city.

On our last day we visited Chinatown shopping street called Petaling Street. It was funny since knowing the markets in Shanghai, they had pretty much exactly the same items on display in KL too.. And it seems to be in every Chinatown  market the same issue that if you want to buy something, you have to bargain unless you want to pay way too much. After eating in Chinatown we continued by walking to the Merdeka Square. On the way there wo shortly stopped at one Temple we had already walked by the other day but it was closed then. Around the square there are many of governmental buildings and on the one end of the square there was probably the world’s highest flagpole. We also visited the KL museum where you can see some pictures and stories of the city’s development. Before returning to the hostel, we walked across Little India. It was actually quite big in KL and had many small shops and restaurants. We spent our last evening at the hostel before taking the night bus to Mersing to catch the ferry to Tioman Islands. 

Trip to Malaysia via Hong Kong

We’re having a 2-week break from the school and the five of us planned to spend the holidays in Malaysia and Singapore. The first plan was to visit a friend of us who is studying in Kuala Lumpur so we flew there first via Hong Kong. The flight from Shanghai to KL started without any problems but the closer we got to HK, the worse the weather got and we had to circle around the Hong Kong International for about 30 minutes before getting the permission to land. According to the flight schedule we should‘ve had 2 hours time in HK before the flight to KL. Due to the thunderstorms our flight was delayed and we didn’t get any information about the estimated departure time. About one hour after the scheduled time we finally got the information from which gate we’re supposed to board, so we walked to the gate. Once at the gate, it was already time to board. However, after getting into the plane nothing happened in the next two hours. Finally after over 3 hours of delay in total our flight took of. The turbulence was really hard in the first 30 minutes but after that it fortunately calmed down.

Thanks to these coincidences we arrived in KL shortly after 4am. We didn’t know exactly how to get from there to the city and first we thought the first train would be leaving at 5.30, but then we found out that it’d leave at 7.30. After eating breakfast at the airport we took a bus to the centrum because the taxis were really expensive. In KL we had to found our hostel in Chinatown area but after a while we found the place and it turned out to be a really nice one, though a bit expensive compared to many other hostels.

After a few hours of sleep we woke up in the middle of the protests. Tens of thousand people were protesting against the government and for clean elections to come during summer or fall. One of the main streets for the protestants was the street in front of our hostel which was full of policemen in the afternoon :) All the people were despite the protests very friendly and peaceful so it was safe to walk around the city. Two times we had to change our route since the police was shooting tear gas into the masses but otherwise it didn’t affect us that much. In the evening we visited some Finnish guys who lived in a very nice penthouse in top of one shopping mall and a hotel. There were in total 11 people living in the huge apartment. After a few hours chatting with them, we headed back to the hostel to rest.