Good Morning Folks,

I did write you a blog last night about my time in Kuala Lumpur, but then the computer at the hostel we were at crashed and I lost it all. Bad times. It was very frustrating, especially as it was one of my best pieces of work. I will try and recreate what can only be described as the worlds best blog which was lost into computer space, but I can't promise I will be able to produce the same magic twice. So please remeber this isn't the greatest blog in the world this is just a tribute.

So let me begin, we arrived in Kuala Lumpur at 3am after a very tiring 20 hours of travelling. We decided to go somewhere and crash out for a while instead of paying for a nights accomodation when we would only be using the room for two hours. We had a stroll around and ended up finiding a 24 hour mcdonalds, it was nice to be requainted with a mcdonalds breakfast again. We rested up and made the most of the free wi-fi by getting directions to our hostel, it was quite a walk but we had plenty of time so started to make long trek to Hotel Cosmopolitan. We arrived after around a 40 minute walk. It was fair to say we were both extremely shattered so went straight to sleep. We didn't do much for the rest of the day apart from chill out, explore a bit of the local area, we did't find much apart from a lot of 7/11 supermarkets and many western fast food restaurants we did try out one of Kuala Lumpur's many curry restaurants though.

The next day was a lot more active, we woke up at the crack of dawn to go down to the twin towers. These are the tallest twin towers in the world. They are also pretty similar to the tower in Dubai. It had the same style and also each have a foutain located at the rear of the building. I'm sure the buildings weer constructed by the same company so this explains the similarities although you'd think they would mix it up a little. We had to go to the towers early to book tickets to go up to the sky bridge and the viewing chamber on the 86th floor, a good 300+ meters from street level. We manged to get our tickets booked but still had some time to kill before our appointment with the top of the tower. So we decided to check out the KLCC shopping centre below the towers and then we decided to go and check out Bukit Nanas, which is basically a forest located in the city centre, next to the KL tower. In the forest there are many different species of animals and plants. Unfortuantely all we saw was a couple of ponies, monkeys and a gecko. We were pretty pressed for time though so didn't manage to do the whole trail. We made our way back to the twin towers and proceeded to make our way up to the sky bridge on the 41st floor, luckily we didn't have to take the stairs and we were escorted up in a lift. The views were pretty outstanding and we could see pretty much all of Kuala Lumpur. Being so far up did nothing for my fear of heights though, which increased a bit when we made our way to the viewing chamber on the 86th floor. The views got even more spectacular, there were models of the city, interactive tv's we could play with and binouclors which made the people at street level look a lot less like ants. When we made our decline from the tower, we decided to go to the aquarium located in the KLCC centre. I enjoyed this, I got to see some interesting aquatic animals such as jellyfish, the electric eel and piranha's. We also had shark's and sting ray's swimming above us and to the side of us when going through the walking tunnel. There was also a reptile / spider centre so I manged to get a few photos of the fury little creatures which I am sure my mother will love. At this point we had done much walking and crammed a lot in, we were tired. It was simple a power nap was needed. After our power nap we decided to head out to some bars we found near the towers. These were a lot more expensive than we were use too, some charging a ridiculous four english pounds for a bottle of beer. We wasn't up for that so tried to get in a club called Black Magic which offered bottles of Carlsberg for a mere 40p. We didn't get let in. The bouncers at the club took issue with me wearing thongs (the aussie word for flip-flops, don't worry I haven't took to wearig that kind of underwear..... yet) and declined our entry so we headed down to the beach bar, which was advertised as the best bar in Kuala Lumpur, we got a free beer on arrival and then ordered a bucket load more. The band were pretty good who were on, the only issue with the place was that it was full of hookers. Now we were getting kinda use to prostitutes in bars as they were all over the place in Asia, but this was a different kettle of fish. I have never seen so many hookers in one place, some blatant lady boys too. (If only I still had the vouchers work had got me)! In no word of a lie or exgeration we were in a bar with at least 100 prostitutes. We had a good time, had some banter with a few prostitutes and then went to get a 60p curry. Top Banana! On our walk back to the hostel we had to walk through a market which was obviously closed at this unearthly hour, as we walked through we realised we were not alone and noticed at least 50 rats scurrying around. Luckily these were more frightened of us then we were of them and were more interested in finding rubbish and scraps of food.

The next day Earl slept, I think things weer catching up with him and maybe he was a little homesick and missing people back home, that is just a guess however, he would never admit that to me. I decided to go and climb the 276 steps and explore Batu caves which Earl did last time he visited Asia. It was ok, caves are caves and I've seen a few on my Asia travels. But what I enjoyed most about these caves were the vast amount of wild monkeys around. They greeted you at the bottom of the steps and were pretty much every inch of the way up on the scrounge for food or up to some sort of mischief. I made my way back and read my book until Earl awoke, we then headed into Chinatown. So far Kuala Lumpur had been very different to anywhere else we had been in Asia, very western and lots of sky scrappers. Chinatown was more what we were use too with street stals selling cheap food and market stalls selling knock-off goods. The bars and restaurants were also at prices we were more use too. We ate, Earl decided to add another string to his growing bow of random foods and ate Shark-fin soup. It looked like gelatine. I just opted for a simple BBQ Pork fried rice and a beer. It was good. After a brief walk around the markets we went to reggea mansion to sample a few of their cocktails and alcoholic beverages.

The next day was to be our last in Kuala Lumpur so took the monorail to the train station to sort tickets out to Singapore. We did this and then made our way to the bird park, which is apparently the largest free-flight walk-in aviary in the world. I looked for a blue pigeon but the closest I got was a blue magpie. We watched hawk's get fed, had our photo took with a variety of birds, fed emu's, watched a stalk try and attack a Chinese couple and another bird casually decided to use Earl's brand spanking new camera as a toilet. It was good fun, until on our way to the bird show a massive thunderstorm hit which promptly cancelled the show. We called time at the Bird Park, I wanted to go to the deer park to maybe find a gift for my father to feed his obsession with reindeer's but unfortunately the rain put a stop to this and we headed back to our hotel to get our bags and stuff ready for the train journey that night. We had a look around our local market stall. Earl then watched a disney film called Entangled or Tangled. It didn't appeal to me so I looked for things to do in Singapore and wrote the world's greatest blog but lost it :(

In conclusion, Kuala Lumpur wasn't one of my most favourite places I have visited, and its one of the evry few places I would probablt not re-visit. Don't get me wrong we had a laugh and it had it's moments and good times, but for me the place was trying to be like Dubai and the western part of the world and didn't really have it's own identity.

Anyway that's all for now, time to explore Singapore.

Speak soon and take care

Adi

xx