Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Asia

I actually woke up this morning at 8am and was well prepared for a full day of sight seeing. And even more amazingly, everyone else was up and ready to go by 10am. Seven of us headed out to the Batu Caves by grabbing a local bus in town. The group was me, Jesse, Ana (Canadian), Louise and Melissa (Holland) and Neils and Natascha (Germany).

We got to the caves and had a walk up to the biggest cave at the top of the hill. There were loads of Hindu shrines inside and outside of the caves, and they were all very colorful. There were also loads of monkeys EVERYWHERE looking for people to give them food. If anyone had food and wasn’t planning on giving it to them, the monkeys would try to take it from them anyway. It was hilarious to see a monkey take a bag of chips right out of a guys’ hands.

We hung out at the Batu Caves for about an hour and I had my first fresh coconut which was pretty good. A young kid chopped the top off the coconut with a cleaver in about 5 seconds, it was impressive! The only thing that would have made it better is if the milk would have been cold. Of course with it being 95*F here almost all the time, it was still pretty refreshing.

We all hopped back on the city bus and headed back into the city center to grab some lunch at the noodle bar. It was a bit of a tight squeeze to get all seven of us at the one table, but we managed. Most of us are still trying to figure out how to use chopsticks efficiently, so it was pretty funny to watch everyone try to eat. We finished up and then split up to see different things in the afternoon.

Natascha, Neils, Ana and I went to the KL Tower and paid the ridiculous price of 45RM ($15) to go to a mini zoo and then go up the tower. It would have been worth it if there was more to see in KL than just the Petronas Towers. There was also no bar or restaurant at the top, so once we did the loop around in probably five minutes, that was it. We were going to stick around for sunset and maybe get some night pictures as well, but that would have meant staying up there for another hour and a half, so we decided against it. Instead we walked over to the Petronas Towers to watch the sunset from the KLCC Park. I just about got to see the sunset before having to hoof it back to the hostel. I caught up with Jesse before he took off for Australia and then started planning what I’m going to do tomorrow.

Ana and I had similar ideas on what we were going to do for the next few days, so we’ve decided to hop over to the east coast of Malaysia for the next few days. After a lot of humming and hawing, we decided that we’re going to hop on the 10:30am bus from KL tomorrow morning that should get us into Kuala Terengganu by about 5pm. From there we should be able to get up to the Perhentian Islands easily enough. As of now, all we have booked is the bus though, so we’ll see what happens…