Kuala Lumpur Part II

In which we go on the craziest taxi journey of our lives

Starring DJ ‘Stella Nutella’

  

We arrived back in Kuala Lumpur rather exhausted after yet another hellishly early start (this was supposed to be a holiday wasn’t it?) and checked into the most amazing hostel – called Back Home.  It certainly became so as I landed up staying almost ten days.  It’s based in Little India so we immediately availed ourselves of the local cuisine including fantastic curries, a restaurant serving only Chapattis and the very addictive Roti Canai – all on our doorstep and ridiculously priced at around £1 a meal. 

Spent a fascinating afternoon taking photos at Chowkit market just north of the city centre. It’s the main wet food market complete with all the usual live produce and some nicely preserved cow heads. 

 

We also took a bus to just outside KL, where, surrounded by a sprawling industrial area of epic proportions is a huge jungle clad, limestone karst riddled with caves. The first set of caves is a series of Hindu temples flooded with light from holes in the ceiling.  The way up was a steep flight of stairs packed with tourists and monkeys who, as usual, took the chance to rob tourists of anything that looked vaguely edible.  Next door is the appropriately named “Dark Cave” containing the world’s rarest spider of which there are only about 100 left, lethal centipedes and a lot of cockroaches and bats. 

No KL trip is complete without a night at the Sky Bar – it has an indoor pool, an incredible view of the Petronas towers and a very chic clientele which we quickly established consisted mainly of oil engineers from Texas. The tunes were being spun by the wittily named DJ Stella Nutella who probably would have struggled to find work, you know, elsewhere. 

The next day was mainly spent in Chinatown – dim sum for breakfast – and much lantern and general tat purchasing by the girls (carrying a backpack generally precludes this!)

In the evening we met up with one of Jo’s work contacts to discuss a possible opportunity for me in KL.  After he’d left we moved onto a bar in the expat enclave of Bangsar where we were befriend by a group of golfers and the main game was dropping a golf ball into someone’s drink which meant they had to down it.  Luckily the champagne we were sipping avoided this ahem, bunker.  The party then moved on to Zeta Bar at the Hilton so we hopped in a taxi and told him to get us there as quickly as possible.  The man took us literally, foot flat through the streets of KL with tyres squealing and smoking around corners.  From the backseat Jo was shouting “Go faster, go faster” and Cath was weakly responding: “No, no, slower, slower”.  He gave me his number, so just in case you need the craziest taxi journey of your life, here it is:

The bar at the Hilton wasn’t quite as salubrious as one might have expected.  We arrived in the middle of a rendition of ‘Zombie’ by a very odd trio of scantily dressed instrumentalists.  Long after the lights came on and the bar closed there were still random people doing break dancing manoeuvres on the sticky, glass strewn floor. 


More pictures: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150433400686058.363633.532581057&type=1&l=e0dc47829f