If you've just tuned in, spotting the words "Kuala Lumpur" on the front page of OffExploring and looking forward to my description of a vibrant city overflowing with sex, drugs and rock and roll, I'm afraid you might be in for a bit of a disappointment. Eloise and I have never been a big fan of cities at the best of times, preferring to spend our holidays in the middle of nowhere getting lost among the backstreets of quaint medieval towns, so I don't think you'll be too shocked when I tell you that a stopover in Kuala Lumpur was not high on our list of priorities. Unfortunately, however, our original plan to fly directly to the superbly over-indulgent Pangkor Laut resort on the west coast of Malaysia fell at the first hurdle when Google stubbornly refused to find us any airlines with a flight on the right day, so here we are, well and truly stuck in a big city whether we like it or not. And every instinct we have is screaming at us to get the hell out.

This might, of course, be totally unfair to cities in general, and Kuala Lumpur in particular. It is, after all, the federal capital of this fair nation and probably just as much a centre of culture as London, Paris or Milton Keynes. Okay, perhaps not Milton Keynes. Indeed, if we had arrived today to find ourselves unexpectedly surrounded by an exciting modern metropolis teeming with happy smiling people, culture oozing from every street, then this entry may have ended up being an open apology for all the stick we've given cities in the past. Unfortunately, though, we haven't seen a single thing in the short time we've been here that makes us want to come back anytime soon - and that's a shame, because I really wanted to be pleasantly surprised.

Okay, now that I've alienated everyone in Malaysia, I should probably point out that we've only been here for a few hours and haven't actually had any time to do anything other than wander the streets building a first impression - but, unfortunately for KL, first impressions count. If we'd had more time, we would almost certainly have done all the things tourists do such as ride to the top of the Petronas Twin Towers - the tallest buildings in the world until Taipai 101 surpassed them in 2004. If I'm honest with you, there is a little voice at the back of my head insisting that I've made a huge mistake in not taking a later flight just in order to do this, but then I look around me and reality sets in again. Still, if somebody offered to fly me in on a helicopter and drop me at the bottom of the towers just so that I could visit them and then leave again, I might actually admit that this is something on my bucket list. I am certainly more than a little impressed with the concept of the skybridge, a feature which connects the 41st and 42nd levels of the towers together and is the highest two story bridge in the world. In high winds, the towers actually sway from side to side - which presumably leads to the ability to sit in your office at the top and watch the world moving back and forth through the window. This creates something of a structural issue for the skybridge, of course, which would simply snap off in high winds and fall onto unsuspecting passers by if it was attached to the buildings in the traditional way - so, and I just want to give you a moment to take this in, it's not actually attached at all. In what must be one of the most original and frightening solutions in the history of architecture, they just made a couple of holes in the sides of the towers and slotted the bridge in. As the towers sway in the wind, the ends of the bridge just slide back and forth in their holes. Now, that's architecture at it's best.

From what we saw of the streets around our hotel, Kuala Lumpur seemed to us to be a particularly polluted and smelly city, even compared to Bangkok - and in some parts of Bangkok, if somebody blindfolded you and asked you to guess where you were, you'd think you were in the sewers. The best description of the smell I could find on the internet suggested that KL smells like burp, which made me laugh for a while even though I'm not entirely sure what burp smells like. One thing's for certain, though - smelling like burp is probably not what you want. Eloise is particularly affected by the heat and smell of cities, and we hadn't ventured far before she started looking a little green around the gills - and let's be honest, if just going out on the street makes you want to reacquaint yourself with last night's dinner, you can be pretty sure it's time to move on.

Due to budgetary constraints and the fact that we were about to stay in somewhere which would require the annual expenditure of a small country, dinner tonight was at McDonalds - say what you like about Maccy D's, there's always one around when you need them. I have no idea whether this particular fast food chain is a new arrival in Kuala Lumpur or not, but getting people to eat there certainly seemed to be an exercise in propaganda on their part. When we first walked through the door, it appeared that choir music was being piped in through hidden speakers around the restaurant, and my first reaction was to think how much nicer this was than the generic musak they play back home. Slowly, however, I started to tune in to the lyrics and realised that what they were actually doing was attempting to brainwash me into coming back - the music was, in fact, a choir of children singing about how delicious the food was. No sooner had the song finished, than it was replaced by a gravelly voiced jazz singer who was keen to teach me everything he knew about Big Macs. It was really quite surreal. On the other hand, Eloise and I have spent much of the night as a result completing each other's sentences by singing "...at McDonalds" - so I guess they've won.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.