A Brief Visit to KL

Kuala Lumpur’s distinctly 'modern' -- there’s something definitely 20th century about its sophisticated steel buildings (especially the Petronas Twin Towers, the main hallmark of the city) and its smart railway stations. The city's not splendidly ethnic and historic like Penang; nor is it pretty like Langkawi -- but it has its own charm, even though that does take a while to grow on you. Give it time, though, and you’ll find places and experiences to interest you.

The Petronas Towers are, of course, the major highlight of any trip to KL; and so is the not-so-imposing Menara Olympia. There’s the Masjed Jamek, the national mosque, with its interestingly unconventional domes; the fabulous Islamic Arts Museum, considered the best of its kind in the world; and the Lake Gardens, a nice place for a break from the heat and bustle of KL’s City Centre. And for experiences other than mere sightseeing, there’s the delightful area around Jalan Petaling, Central Market and Chinatown -- a place where street stalls and chic stores sell everything from classy pewter to trashy T-shirts, ripe red rambutans to highly-spiced satays. A good place to hang out, shop, or just get a taste of how multicultural Kuala Lumpur actually is.

Quick Tips:

As in almost every other city in this part of the world, in Kuala Lumpur too the first thing you’ve got to remember is to bargain. The second? Bargain. And the third, the fourth . . . bargain! We discovered with bitter experience that this simple rule applies to everything, whether you’re negotiating a price for a souvenir or checking out a taxi fare (we paid RM8 for a place which was a five-minute walk away; this was as soon as we arrived in KL, and it took some getting over!). The best way to figure out approximately what you should pay is to ask around a bit (maybe check with staff at the hotel you’re staying); check with at least three vendors before making a choice; and then come to a decision. And once that’s done, haggle -- begin by quoting about 60% or so of what you’re being asked for.

Other than that, there’s really not much you need to particularly look out for. KL’s well-equipped with signs in English, and most people speak or understand enough for it for you to be able to manage, so that’s not a problem.

Best Way To Get Around:

Kuala Lumpur’s fairly easy to move around in, and what makes life easier for a traveler is the fact that many of the major sights are pretty close together, most of them being centred around and about KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre). The city has a fast and economical train system, which even though it’s not totally extensive, is at least fairly convenient.

Other than the train system, there are taxis -- good for getting around to places where trains don’t go, but make sure you fix on the fare with the cabbie before embarking on your journey. There are other options, too: local buses, both mini and shuttle, and hired cars -- but the one we found most fulfilling was our own two legs -- KL’s really best explored on foot.

Kuala Lumpur’s short on great sights (barring the Petronas Towers, of course), but here’s one you can’t afford to miss: the Islamic Arts Museum. It sits tucked away in the Lake Gardens, and we (I must admit!) came upon it by chance- a stunning building topped with an ornately embellished blue dome and a beautifully worked façade.

The Museum’s considered the best of its kind anywhere in the world, and it’s easy to see why: the two huge floors it occupies are an amazing insight into Islamic art and its sheer variety. There’s just about everything here that’s got anything to do with art, applied and otherwise. There are countless illuminated Qurans, manuscripts (including treatises on medicine, astronomy, Islamic law, etc; illuminated histories, marriage certificates and samples of calligraphy from as far apart as China and Turkey, Iran and India), weaponry, jewellery, costumes and more.

To actually pinpoint one section as the best among the entire lot would be difficult; this entire collection’s stunning. There are sections on just about every Islamic dynasty that’s ever ruled anywhere in the world- the Safavids, the Turkomans, the Moors, the Mughals and others; and on just about every type of typically Islamic art ever produced. There’s an entire Ottoman room- complete with wall hangings, furnishings, and more, all in a sumptuous combination of fabulously dull reds, greens and browns.

There’s a section on household items- rosewater sprinklers, vases and more- crafted from brass, beaten silver and copper; beautifully painted pottery- much of it of the typical blue tile type; gem-encrusted, jade-handled khanjars (daggers) and swords; astrolabes, wooden chests and caskets inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory (some wonderful samples from Spain included), exquisite jewellery from Mughal-era India and from Turkmenistan. One of the best pieces on display is a large reproduction of the Quran, on a single bedsheet-sized piece of cloth, which had been commissioned by Nadir Shah. There are exquisite prayer rugs; a gorgeous white-and-deep-blue chandelier; coins; wonderfully embroidered pashmina shawls, beautifully wavy Malay krises, and- the pièce de resistance- a huge hall of major Islamic monuments of the world.

This last one houses exquisitely constructed models of major mosques and other Islamic monuments of the world, all made more or less to scale, beautifully decorated, and with each minute detail worked in. It must’ve taken them ages to craft- and it shows. The Taj Mahal, the Dome of the Rock, the mosques at Samarkand, Isfahan, Mecca (this one holds 7,30,000 worshippers normally and as many as 1 million during the Haj and Ramadan) and Medina, as well as lesser-known mosques in places like China and Indonesia, where local architectural styles have effected mosque designs considerably.

All in all, a museum worth every minute you spend inside it (we got here around lunchtime, and were so enthralled by it that despite the fact that we were ravenous, we couldn’t tear ourselves away from it!).

Entry to the museum is RM8 per person.

The one structure which truly dominates Kuala Lumpur is the gleaming twin-towered Petronas Towers, the world’s tallest building. It’s sleek, sophisticated and totally twenty-first century- and way up there on Kuala Lumpur’s sights-to-see. Okay, my husband and I are more into museums, historical monuments and local bazaars- `culture vultures’ as a very highbrow friend had once deprecatingly told us not to describe her; but we couldn’t possibly leave KL without checking out the Towers, could we?

So off we went, one warm morning, taking the local Putra LRT train to KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre), from where Petronas is a hop, skip and jump away. Every morning, 8.30 onwards, 1,300 free visitor passes are given out to go up to the skybridge at Petronas, and we managed to get a pair- for a 12 o’clock visit, which was just a few minutes after we reached the building.

The Petronas Towers, inaugurated in 1999, soar to 452 mt. The buildings were designed by an Argentinian architect (Cesar Pelli) for an American architectural firm, one tower being built by a Japanese construction firm, the other by a South Korean one (that takes some beating when it comes to being truly global!). The entire structure’s made of glass, steel and reinforced `superconcrete’ which allows the towers to sway as much as 10 inches in strong wind conditions. One tower’s occupied by the Malaysian petroleum company, Petronas; the other houses mega multinational companies such as Boeing, Alcatel, Reuters, GE, and others.

The tower’s design- of interlocked squares, with alternate corners angular and rounded- is carried through the entire building. As soon as you enter the lobby, you’ll see it: in the flooring and the chandeliers, and of course later when you whiz up to the skybridge and look down between the towers. Silvery and gleaming, it’s all very impressive.

Our trip to the skybridge wasn’t very long- 1,300 visitors in the space of a few hours means you don’t get much time to loiter about at your own pace. Anyway, the 10 minutes we got were fairly sufficient. We were zoomed up in a special lift (which travels at the rate of 1 floor per second) to the skybridge on the 41st floor, where we were allowed to take as many photographs as we wanted while a guide explained the basics of the building. The view from the skybridge, even though it’s not from the top of the Towers, is spectacular- you can see all across the city below, and beyond too. Fabulous!

The Lake Gardens were right up there on all the `must see in KL’ lists we’d gleaned from books and websites, so one fine day, after having spent some time jostling through the busy bazaars of the city, we took a train to KL Sentral, from where we got a taxi to the Lake Gardens. The Lake Gardens (Taman Tasik Perdana) centre around an artificial lake, and spread out over an expanse of 229 acres. It’s a huge sprawling complex of trees (mainly jacaranda, palms, bamboo and eucalyptus), watercourses and ponds. Jogging trails lead through the area and every now and then there’s a pebble path, covered with smooth round pebbles over which you can walk, barefooted, to try some reflexology on yourself.

The Lake Gardens are popular with locals, and within the park itself are a few isolated gardens, each a sight in itself. It was our misfortune that the first one we entered- the Deer Garden- was so disappointing (very drab and with barely a deer in sight) that we turned back almost from the entrance itself. The second one, the Butterfly Garden (Taman Rama) was, however, much more satisfying. It had plenty of butterflies, including some large and exquisitely colourful ones, all of them fluttering about under a huge canopy of net, with trees, plants and flowers all about. Pathways meandered through the enclosed garden, and every now and then, along the way, was the occasional surprise- a little wooden table with bright scarlet hibiscus flowers, sprayed with a solution of honey, supposed to supplement the butterflies’ diet. And there were other diversions, not all of them connected with lepidoptera: small birdcages; ponds filled with koi (a Japanese carp), turtles and terrapins- all are part of the jumble. The exit leads through a huge and well-labelled collection of butterflies, moths, beetles, arachnids, grasshoppers and whatnot- some beautiful, some masters of the art of disguise, many downright creepy, but most very interesting.

Another of the gardens within the Lake Gardens is the Orchid Garden- we were very keen on seeing this, but fate decided to play a mean trick on us, and we couldn’t find it (yes, sounds crazy, but there’s a shortage of signboards around, and very few people were in the park- and those who were there didn’t understand English). Things turned out for the best, though – having lost our way, we ended up at what is easily the best of the Lake Gardens’ attractions, the splendid Islamic Arts Museum (there’s a separate journal entry for this; it’s definitely one of Kuala Lumpur’s top sights).

Entry to the Lake Gardens is free, but you’ll have to pay entry fees to visit the various sights within the gardens. Entry to the Islamic Art Museum, for instance is RM8, while entry to the Butterfly Garden is RM10.

The Petronas Towers may be Kuala Lumpur’s most well-known landmark, but the Menara Olympia isn’t too far behind. Kuala Lumpur’s pride and joy, the 421 mt high Menara Olympia is a telecommunications tower (the fourth tallest in the world) and offers a stunning view of the city below. The word menara is Malay for `tower’, and the tower’s architectural basis is the Islamic muqarna (squinch). I didn’t think the tower at all pretty, really (except for the rather nice blue-and-ochre tilework at the entrance), but the view from the top is great. The Menara Olympia stands atop a hill which is part of the Bukit Nanas reserve- there’s a fair bit of greenery around, and we even saw a few dark grey monkeys as we made our way up to the tower.

We visited Menara on the very first day we arrived in KL; and after we’d fished out the entry fees (a solid RM15 per person), we were herded, along with a group of other tourists, into a lift headed for the top of the tower. The lift whizzed up to the observatory deck at an ear-popping speed, and there we were- looking out over the city. At the top, there are personalised audio presentations- each on a walkman which you can clap onto your head- which allow you to view all of Kuala Lumpur from the top of Menara, at your own pace, telling you exactly what you’re seeing from so-and-so-window, etc, etc.

And what you can see is really most of the capital city: the Parliament, the National Mosque, the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve, the Petronas Twin Towers, Central Market and a number of nearby mosques and churches (one in Chinatown, liberally besprinkled with Chinese lettering all over its otherwise very European twin-spired façade).

If for nothing else, Menara’s worth visiting just to see the city below.

Jalan Petaling and its nearby Central Market (both in the heart of Chinatown) are more or less the hub of street life in Kuala Lumpur. A busy, heaving and extremely colourful warren of narrow lanes, tiny shops, glittering stores, rickety stalls and more, this is the place to come for shopping, for eating out, for getting a taste of KL at its busiest.

The entire area’s very cosmopolitan and very exotic- every other shop has a name lettered in Chinese (or in some cases, Tamil- the Indian presence is very obvious here, where many restaurants specialise in `curry foods’; lots of women wander around in saris and salwar kurtas; sellers of pirated VCDs and DVDs sell Hindi movie prints; and the latest Hindi film music blares from roadside microphones). My husband and I, being Indians, weren’t particularly taken up with the `Indian’ aspect of KL- it was too much like home to feel like a foreign country!

You could spend entire days wandering around Jalan Petaling and Central Market and still not get bored- there’s so much to see and buy! We spent about two hours on a long round of window-shopping through Central Market’s antique stores, flower shops, souvenir stores and the famous Royal Selangor Pewter store. The Royal Selangor factory dates back to 1885 and is today the world’s leading producer of pewter- their pewter conforms to the highest accepted standards- it contains 97% tin (the rest is copper). The range of items on display at the store is spectacular and very tempting- though the only thing we actually could afford was a pretty little pewter elephant- exquisite!

Outside, the array of stalls is fascinating: souvenirs, trashy junk, shoes- and food. Some of the food stalls sell strange local sweets and savouries (neither my husband nor I have too much of a liking for Malay food, so we never sampled any of their wares, though). A tiny clutch of them sell fruit- rambutans and mangosteens in particular- which we promised ourselves we’d buy, but never actually got around to it. The food stalls, however, are heavily outnumbered by the rest of the stalls: T-shirt shops and countless stalls line the streets, selling everything from shoes and belts to watches, pens, bags, wallets, VCDs and DVDs - all of them pirated. While we were there, there was a sudden police scare and all the pirated VCDs / DVDs stalls disappeared in a twinkling - but came back after 30 minutes, when the cops had retreated.

51 km from Kuala Lumpur is one of Malaysia’s most popular hill resorts- Genting Highlands. No, not a tranquil little place where you can have the misty hills all to yourself; this is a huge amusement complex, and the crowds are noisy and colourful. The bus from KL to Genting Highlands leaves from the Puduraya bus station (a dirty, crowded place reeking of petrol fumes), but the hour’s drive to the Highlands makes up for the pollution at the station. The road passes in front of Batu Caves (home to an important Hindu shrine), through open country and then through the hills, which are thickly forested with bamboo, banana, coconut palm, tree fern, orchids and hibiscus- all of it cool and dense, with a very high tree canopy.

The bus ride terminates at Genting, where we got off and took a cable car ride of 15 minutes to the Genting Highlands resort, a vast complex of food-and-beverage outlets, casino, entertainment venues and more. The view over the hills from the bus station up to the complex is spectacular; the wind howls and whistles all around, and the path of the cable car is marked by life-size (and badly made) dummies of monkeys, bears, local people, elephants and rafflesias- all rather awful. But for these monstrosities the ride would have been splendid.

We’d reached Genting by 12.30, and it was by then overrun by tourists of every shape and size. It’s a popular resort, especially with families, and actually encompasses much more than what we visited. There are hotels, with restaurants, discos and a casino; an 18-hole golf course; a horse ranch, two theme parks- and loads of bustle. We didn’t stay the night; all we did was buy ourselves a day’s entry ticket (RM30 each) to the Outdoor Theme Park. Along with the ticket, you’re given a wristband (which you surrender when you’re leaving); the wristband entitles you to free rides all across the park.

The Outdoor Theme Park’s rides are rather outdated and not as great as all that, but they’re fun. There’s the Flying Dragon, Space Shot, Corkscrew, Go-karting, a flume and whatnot- much screaming and shouting. We spent some time on the rides, then went off inside into the closest hotel to wander through the shopping arcade, to check our e-mail at a convenient little nook with an internet connection, and then to have lunch at a coffee shop called World Kafe, where the Malaysian fried rice, though excellent, was expensive. The redeeming feature of the coffeshop was the signboard outside: `Please drop your values ideas here’. An invitation for suggestions or an invite to be as immoral as you please? I’d like to know!!)

After lunch, it was time to go back to KL, so we surrendered our wristbands, took the cable car back downhill, then got onto the bus. An entire day’s trip, a little hectic, at times irritating (when the crowd starts to get to you), but otherwise quite a bit of fun!