21/04/2013
Our hotel room is small but ok except the walls are on the thin side with not much sound proofing. Our neighbours, last night, decided to sit up all night yelling at one another, as Asians tend to do, so we had a bad night and had to complain to the hotel management this morning.
We spent the first couple of hours in the Central Market where we bought some good authentic stuff. Then in the Petaling Street market we bought a designer leather handbag and some top of the range polo shirts, all very good fakes and at the right price after a bit of good natured haggling.
For the afternoon we hired car and driver to take us on a tour of the city which we thoroughly enjoyed. Our man took us round the usual tourist sites ending up at a chocolate factory where we skirmished with a million Japanese. With the population of Japan divided up between Cairns, Bali and here the country must be empty.
One of the highlights of the tour was getting up close to the giant Petronas Twin Towers though we were probably too close to get good photo’s, I had to lie flat on my back to get the towers in the frame. Until recently these towers were the tallest buildings in the world. We visited the Royal Palace where more hordes of Japanese pushed and shoved to get their photo’s taken next to the palace guards, they can be a very ignorant race at times. At the war memorial their objective seemed to be, who could strike the most stupid pose for photo’s in front of the statue depicting those who died in the wars.
Our evening meal was another in a cheap and cheerful oriental eating house. Watery chicken soup, fried rice, bbq’d duck with a chilli sauce for less than £2 each.
22/04/2013
Had to call for management in the middle of the night to sort out the noisy bastards next door. Not good enough!
KL is famous, amongst other things’ for cheap consumer goods, some fake but lots of genuine stuff. We have decided, after all the anguish with our shiny thing, to invest in a supa dupa shining thing, one that works. So this morning we set off in a taxi to visit a 4 storey shopping mall that sells nothing but state of the art shiny stuff. We wandered around the store trying to give the impression we knew what we were looking at and asking daft questions, ( what colours do they come in…) and taking notes. As we don’t know a gigabyte from a mossie bite we had consulted our UK guru for his advice and the answer was that the way to go is to get an I Pod and forget the bloody flip top thing.
Well now we are feeling quite smug as we are the owners of a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, every home should have one apparently. We are doubly smug as we paid a lot less than they are advertised for on Amazon. All we need to do now is find out how the bugger works, that’s after we find out how to charge the battery…………..KIMMM!
23/04/2013
Our last day before we fly home tomorrow. We have spent it by going up country with our duty driver out of the city about 240K’s away. The main highway north takes you out of Malaysia and into Thailand, we didn’t quite get that far. We stopped to look at a rubber plantation where the trees were being tapped for latex, then a palm oil forest. Palms cover a vast area of the country and are overtaking rubber on the export market. Used for cooking, soap, cosmetics and being developed into fuel.
Up into the Cameron Highlands where we had a nice cup of tea at a huge plantation. The tea here is still picked by hand using mainly a foreign workforce and looks to be hard work. The tea plantations we saw in Australia were mostly on flat ground and the tea was harvested by machine. Here it’s far too hilly to get a machine to do it.
We were taken to a mountain village that had a nice waterfall ( tour guides seem to love waterfalls) and once past the Japanese tourists we got some good photos. By lunchtime the heavens opened and from then on it was difficult to see much through the pouring rain. We had a delicious (cheap) Indian lunch before setting off back down the mountain and back onto the motorway to KL. Driving in miserable conditions we could have been on any motorway in the world, all muck and spray and we couldn’t help thinking that this is Malaysia’s way of softening us up for our return to the UK.
Our final evening in Chinatown has been interesting as we had a deep and meaningful discussion with a Chinese man with a speech impediment. While we were chatting a rat hunt was taking place as one of the waiters with a big stick chased a rat around the cold drinks cabinet in our eating house. The rat escaped!
Time to pack the bags for the last time.
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