[Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia] Not much to do in this big city but shop and since we can’t really do that we decided to get on a city tour bus. V got stuck reading until 2am and I didn’t sleep that well (still nursing over 40 bed bug bites from that infested hole on love lane) so it was a groggy start to the day. The bus was impressive with audio commentary and free WiFi faster than our hotel. Starting with the best intentions we got off at an early stop, The Royal Palace – we should have done some research. It’s not very impressive from the fence and access is not allowed. The only thing to do is take photos of/with the guards at the gate. The system of monarchy is odd here – a democratic monarchy? Nine of the states here have sultans and every 5 years they take turns to be the king of the country.

Back on the bus for a short hop around the impressive central station (with cool looking monorail) and through the ‘Little India’ shopping district got us to the National Museum. The pre-historic and colonial sections were the most was interesting to us and as far as museums go it was compact. Near the entrance some guys were selling test drives on a Segway. Two laps around the museum for RM20 – it was tempting, maybe next time.

By the time we got back on the bus it was nearly lunch time so we decided to skip some sites (they looked boring anyway) and head straight for the highlight of the day – the Petronas towers. It took a while to get there and we opted to grab a bite in the monster mall attached to the towers before heading on up. Truly European (especially the prices). Yikes! We walked into a big disappointment in the towers. Turns out they only allow 900 people a day to go up and no more tickets were available. Totally gutted we tried to make the most of it by taking some pics from the fountains out front. It is an amazing sight to see all that stainless steel. A beautiful piece of engineering.

A circuit on the tour bus takes around 3 hours with no stops so we decided to get back on and ride it all the way around back to The towers to see it in the evening then jump on the last bus home. We used the short photo stops to snap shots of the sites along the route – Independence Square and the KL Comm Tower amongst others. Nothing really grabbed our attention enough to get off the bus and explore, especially when it started raining, and after fighting our way through traffic we got back to the towers around 7pm (4 hours later). Without WiFi on the bus we would have gone nuts but that wasn’t the only entertainment. The audio guide was not working so the ticket collector was doubling as a tour guide. His accent and ad-lib commentary were hilarious. The elongated ‘Terima Kasih’ (thank you) at the end of every announcement was classic.

We watched and photographed the towers as night fell and the floodlights warmed up changing the light from sunset oranges to halogen whites reflecting off the stainless steel. We were joined by a couple dozen other tourists around the fountains. It was beautiful to see.

The traffic around KLCC seemed gridlocked and after wasting 10 minutes waiting for a bus that had little chance of arriving we decided to hike it back to the hotel. It was a good call. We were moving much faster on foot than the traffic and thanks to our phones and GPS we didn’t have a problem finding our way home through the concrete maize of KL (even managed to stumble across a Dunkin Donuts on the ~3km walk). It was a long day confirming that big cities are still not our scene. Gimme mountains, caves, seas and rivers please.

[Pictures: Petronas day and night]

– Posted from my iPhone via WiFi