Week 83: Kuala Lumpur & Singapore

So the next stop on the flight was a trip to Malaysia and Singapore before heading back to the US for some family fun.  We booked 3 days in Kuala Lumpur, and one day in Singapore.  We had one day planned, and decided to wing the rest.  Our travel day was actually normal, which is nice.  I had too much beer or spicy food or something, but my stomach finally caught up with me, so the ulcer was not so great.  We were hit with a bunch of exit fees when we left the Philippines, but at this point we were quite used to it, and were ready to go somewhere new.  Poor Pretch had to pay a vacation fee, which is only charged to people in country who are leaving on vacation, it's actually more expensive than the traveller's exit fee.  Kinda weird, I suppose if you're rich enough to go on vacation, you can probably pay a vacation fee.  She got secondary scruitiny upon exit, needing me to verify that she was going with me, and not going to bail the country forever.  I guess that's a thing over there.   We went to bed early.  

The next day, we walked around alot. Walked through the dataran merdeka area, went first to scammy chocolate museum.  There were 2 chocolate extraction machines, and over priced chocolates.  I bought some coconut 

chocolate, since I'm very easy to guilt into buying things.

We then checked out the city gallery, a free exhibit that showed the progression of the city, and the future expansions.  It had a very detailed scale model of the city, which was actually quite neat.

We then visited the oldest church in the city, St Mary church, then checked out a couple of temples, one Indian temple, and one Chinese temple.  Kinda cool, I wish I had more to say, but they all look kinda similar at some point.  I overheard a conversation about what not to wear, so you don't get mugged.  I could have just modeled for the guy, showing what not to wear.

We then headed out to Chinatown, which in its own right is quite fun.  If you like to haggle, and buy cheap knock off stuff, this is the place to be.  Anything you want, from shirts to handbags, to watches, jackets.  I bought a Ferrari shirt, and drank some bitter herbal tea.  The food court is cheap, and everyone is drinking Guiness. Pretty cool if you ask me.  Especially in the middle of the day.  

The highlight of the day, aside from the knockoff shirt was the KL bird park.  This is one of the open parks, and is absolutely gigantic.   Bird fly by you, the scavengers try to eat your food, it's a great time.  But it is open.  Which means if it rains, then there's no where to hide.  We braved it, got a little soggy, but got some good pictures, and had a great time.

The last stop around the area was the Islamic Historical Museum, which was pretty interesting.  There was an exhibit that showed to process of Hajj, and how the folks from Malaysia headed over back in the day and then now.  We went into one of the mosques as well, no shorts were allowed, so we all had to wear habayas.  The museum is pretty impressive, and shows true dedication, especially back in the day before airplanes.  Multiple month trips with little money to go.  

We were hungry again, so from the travel channel, we tried to go to little India.  The jerk taxi driver took us to a little india, and charged us extra.  We had the best of it, and I introduced the folks what really good Indian food is.  It was spicy, and delicious!  

So I misread our start time for our walking trek, by about an hour, but our guide was pretty cool, and we were the only group in the trek.  It was an easy trek to a pretty quiet waterfall that no one really visits.  The morning started off with a really good fusion of breakfast, including different roti's, fruit and egg.  The trek itself was nice, not too hot, and no rain, which was great.  We did some jumping into the water, and Hoang lost glasses, Pretch forgot that she doesn't do well with deep water, and the fish were hungry to nip at your feet, so we only spent half an hour or so there.

We had a good time.  The guy had a instant changing tent so that we could change out of our wet clothes.  Really good guy, and someone I'd recommend going with if you want to hike.  After the hike, he took us to a small town with really good Chinese food, we had some fresh Mongoose King Durian, apparently the premium type of durian. It wasn't as strong as a regular durian, and a little sweeter, but still very much an acquired taste.
Our guide then proceeded to drop us off at the Batu caves.  The batu caves is a giant cave and hindi temple.  It has the world largest depiction of Murugan, which is 140 feet tall, and fully painted in gold.  It's hard to describe, as the size is just incredible once you enter in.  The entrance takes 262 steps, which for us was a bit tiring, but we made it.  We got to see one of the ceremonies happening, and the acoustics were pretty epic.  The monkeys there are pretty aggressive.  It's pretty interesting, they know how to open twist off caps, but haven't figured out how to drink water directly from the bottle.  They'll open the cap, and spill it on the ground, which is kinda funny.  There were also some pretty cute baby monkeys too.

On the way back to the Batu caves, we went to the Low Yat Mall, which is 7 stories of electronic stores.  It had everything you could think of, which was cheap for the area, but pretty expensive compared to US prices.  I haggled a while with one of the guys for a flash drive and a power cable.  All of the items broke about a month after I got them back in country.  Live and learn.  Don't buy electronics from an unreputable seller.  Especially one that you can haggle so much.  We had dinner at an Arabic place, go figure, and found a trendy bar with live music.  The singers were not the best, and the drinks were a bit expensive.  But we saw some guy that looked like a drugged out version of Jackie Chan.  No pictures.  The body guards were big and angry.  We had some Courvoisier, and Pretch had a green drink of sorts.  Pretty mellow ending to a day full of walking.  The taxi guy drove pretty aggressively, and ran a few red lights.  No worries, he earned his tip, since we were still alive.

We were tired, and woke up late.  The Petronius towers only have a certain number of tickets available in the morning, and you have to be there around 7 or so to get the tickets.  We arrived at 11.  Not even close. We got some good pictures before the rain came in though.

 After jumping on Tripadvisor, a recommended food place was Lot 10, which is a bunch of smaller asian food stores, we had some quick bites, and stumbled upon an even bigger version of Chinatown's cheap knock off stores.  this time it was in a mall.  We spent the rest of the time there, trying to figure how to get out.  It was a huge huge stores.  Hoang bought eye glass frames and I bought a laser pointer, Pretch a bag, and some souveniers.  Hoang got a pedicure, and we headed out to the pavilion, which was the nicer mall.

 We had the famous ate din tai fung dumplings, with comfort food greens, and stumbled into a beer bar located on the other side of the city, called Taps.  We were the only people there, but it was nice to drink some good beer again.  We had a flight to Singapore the next day.

Singapore is one of my favorite cities.  We were only there for one day, but the feel of the city, the layout, the smell, everything about this city was great.  Well, it's a great place to visit, it'd be a super expensive place to live.

Man, this is coming from a person that's used to paying a fair amount of money for beer, as a high "sin" tax.  Food costs were probably around 3x what you'd be expecting in the states.  Since we only had a day over there, we decided to go all out, and stay at the Marina Bay Sands.  It's a famous casino/hotel that is known for having the largest elevated infinity pool in the world.  It's pretty epic, and with a view that cannot be described.  My favorite part is see soo many tourists going about taking pictures over the edge with cameras that do not well with water.  Anything for a great pic I suppose.

Our tour was fairly short, we went to the best Chili Crab in Singapore, which was pretty tasty.  It was a bit off the beaten path, which for me, means that it must be good.  They also had a white pepper crab, which was very spicy.  Both very delicious.

We took a tour around to the Clark Quay, which is a rennovated area that was built with the modern look in mind.  Pretty swanky, we went to a pasta place, and headed to the museum.

The museum gave us an appreciation of Singapore, as well as a better understanding of how religions and different country influences effect the melting pot that is Singapore.  Notice the Buddha sitting on a cross.

We didn't do any gambling, we got rained on pretty heavily, but it definitely did not damp our spirits.  It was a great ending to a great trip, and by far one of the most memorable.