The Petronas

The final decision of whether or not to go to Kuala Lumpur on Friday was made on Thursday. There was a group consisting of about 8 finns, 2 germans, 3 swedes, 2 canadians, a dutch and a slovak.

We left the campus early in the morning, at 8 o'clock, by taxi to the Woodlands checkpoint on the northern border (S$20 per car). Having cleared the customs, we took a local bus to the Johor Bahru bus interchange where several companies were offering express rides to KL. The price per person seemed to be quite fixed RM31 but I managed to negotiate it down to RM24 because we were a group of at least 15 people. This was of no use, however, because someone had already taken the offer of RM31 and were boarding onto a bus...

This trip was really convenient in an aircond bus with seats like the business class on a typical flight. It was a good time to sleep some more. The bus stopped for 20 mins at some kind of a break area where we could get some fast food to supplement the lean breakfast.

The ride took something like 5 hours, of which we spent at least an hour in a jam just a kilometer or two from the KL bus station. Most people were staying in the "cheapest shithole" they could find -- which was actually a pretty good description for that lousy hostel in Chinatown. I had booked a room in the huge Grand Seasons hotel near the north end of the monorail, so this was the time for me and the canadian guy Tim to part from the group to check in to our hotel. We got a typical two-bed hotelroom on the 20th floor -- nice change for the Hall 7 accommodation.

We were supposed to rendezvous with the others at Petronas towers at 7pm, but hardly made it there by 7:30 and couldn't find the others anywhere. Well, later they told us they were actually even more late... Anyway, we looked around a little bit, had a dinner and a couple of beers and returned to the hotel in order to wake up quite early next morning to get the free Sky bridge tickets.

One of the positive sides of staying in a hotel is the plentiful breakfast. It was a combination of continental and asian styles and really hit the spot. The monorail trip and a half a kilometer's walk to the Petronas towers took some 40 minutes, so we were there around 8:15am. Unfortunately this was way too late -- all the tickets were already gone despite that the counter would not open until 9am. It was really a kick in the teeth, but no-can-do.

We wanted to get "high" anyway, so the KL tower was the next obvious choice. It was actually almost double as high as the Petronas sky bridge, but cost like RM35 to enter. The view overlooking all around the city was very nice of course, and they had a short audio tour describing the different sights and monuments. The entrance fee also allowed us to visit a small but quite an interesting zoo with snakes, scorpions, monkeys and frogs to name a few. A pleasant surprise was that we met Jussi and Josh here reuniting the groups again. I usually avoid western food and tourist restaurants, but the club sandwich in the Rainforest café down in the tower was just awesome.

There were lots of bazaars in chinatown close to the hostel. They were just too tempting to pass, so almost everyone grabbed a shirt or two, some flipflops or shorts and maybe a belt or a "swiss army" pocket knife. After having late lunch at the bird park, the day started already to turn into a night, and the plan for the evening was to enjoy "a few" beers at the Petronas and then proceed to a club. The plan encountered some setbacks though, as the grocery stores stopped selling beer around 9 o'clock. Luckily this was easily fixed by the discovery of wine in one of the stores. Another kind of a setback was that people wore shorts and flipflops which are not good enough for any fine club (like the  Zouk), and, perhaps some of us were getting a little bit too drunk to enter any club, for that matter.

All the clubs downtown were pretty crowded and lots of people were also hanging out in the streets, but eventually we found a club that let us in although the group had already broken down a little bit, so there were only like 10 people left. The club closed after 3am and most of us were tired enough to get a cab and go to bed at this point. I'm not sure if the rest still continued partying somewhere.

We grabbed some breakfast in the morning but went back to bed and slept until the check-out at noon. People were heading back to S'pore at different times, but I thought there wasn't really enough time to see anything remarkable in KL anymore, so we just took a walk to the bus station and bought tickets for a direct ride to Singapore.

It was kind of a mistake. The bus was about 1.5 hours delayed, made two stops and was driving quite slowly. Then it took us to the depot next to the Levender MRT, which is almost an hour's trip from the Boon lay station. So finally I was back home around 10pm.

There is still a lot to see in KL so I think I'm going to have to make another trip quite soon.

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