Malaysia!

This weekend, I headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with some friends.  I felt justified taking Monday off because it was technically a public holiday, Deepavali, the Hindu festival of lights.  So, Saturday morning we caught the bus and headed off to KL.

The bus ride is quoted as taking 5 hours, but it took more like 6.5.  The border crossings add significant time - one at the Singapore border to leave Singapore, then the bus drives over a short bridge and you have to repeat the same process to enter Malaysia.  But, the ride was quite scenic and also included a lot of sleeping.  For most of the drive up into Malaysia, the highway was surrounded by neat, straight rows of pineapple plantations:

The first stop after dropping our stuff off at the hostel were the Batu Caves, which are about 10 km north of KL.  We took the public bus, which is always an adventure.  I love taking public buses in new countries - the routes they take are typically less direct than trains or taxis, so you see a lot more of the neighborhoods, as well as all different types of people.  Similar to the buses in Nicaragua, these buses had "bus wranglers" who would call out the bus destinations at the station and then sell the tickets once the bus had started on its route.  This is actually a very workable solution for countries without fancy buses with automatic ticket machines, and the bus wranglers tend to be really helpful in figuring out which bus to take and where to get off.  Anyways, the Batu Caves are a Hindu religious site that contain shrines and temples.  Here is the main cave:

The statue here is 140 ft tall, and is of Lord Murugan, a Hindu deity especially popular with the Tamil population of Southern India (a lot of the Indians here and in Malaysia are Tamils).  This is the tallest statue of Lord Murugan in the world!  To get to the main cave, you have to climb up 272 steps:

The main hazard here is not the steps themselves by the obnoxious monkeys - they were everywhere!  They were very used to people and very brave; visitors are advised to hold onto their bags tightly or the monkeys will run up and steal them, in the hopes that they contain food.  Inside the caves, statues and shrines were nestled into every nook and cranny.  They were hard to make out in the dark, but a lot of them were really weird and made me wish I knew what the legends behind them were.  There were also two more temples inside the caves:

That night, we did some shopping at Petaling Street, which is actually a market spread over several streets in Chinatown.  The stalls were full of convincing and not-so-convincing knockoffs of popular brands.  Our favorite store was a combination Christmas/Chinese New Year store.  Here is my friend Nathalie with the Christmas display:

I have to say, eating Chinese food in Malaysia to the sound of Christmas carols was a bit surreal. 

The next day, we woke up bright and early to obtain tickets to visit the Petronas Twin Towers.  At 1483 feet, the Petronas Towers were the tallest building in the world from 1998 until 2004, when they were beaten by Dubai.  However, they are still the world's tallest twin tower building.  The skybridge, at 558 feet, is open for visitors and free if you arrive early enough to get a ticket for the day.  We queued for about an hour (I really enjoy using queue as a verb.  It sounds so much better than "stand in line".) and got our tickets for later in the day.  We then headed outside to take some pictures with the towers.  Here they are:

Because of the extreme height of the towers, it was quite difficult to take pictures with a person in the foreground and the towers in the background.  As a result of this, people were putting themselves in all kinds of funny positions on the ground in order to get the right angle.  I noticed one guy off to the side quietly taking pictures of all the people in these funny poses.  He noticed me and, after making a shushing motion, came over to show them to me.  They were really funny!  He said he didn't care about the towers, he just liked taking pictures of the people; I also thought the pictures of the people were way more interesting.  After some lunch, we returned to the towers at our scheduled time.  First, we watched a really hokey 3D movie about Petronas, the national petroleum company of Malaysia.  This movie looked like it was made in the early 80s - odd considering that the towers weren't built until 1998.  It was pretty funny though.  Then, we took the elevator up to the skybridge.  Look at all the floors!

The elevator was really speedy, it ascended at 5 or 6 m/s.  Here I am on the skybridge:

Since it was the weekend of Deepavali, malls and stores had festive Deepavali displays set up.  These displays consisted mostly of rice paintings called kolam.  Kolam are a sort of artistic prayer - they invite the goddess Lakshmi into the house or building to bless the inhabitants.  Here is my favorite one that I saw:

 The next day, we again woke up early to catch the bus to Malacca Town, another Malaysian city that is on the way back to Singapore from KL.  Malacca was originally a Portuguese colony, and was settled later by the Dutch and the British.  There are a lot of historical buildings and influences left from these different colonising groups, and Malacca was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 (this was actually quite unfortunate, since it meant that the place was crawling with tourists).  We took the local bus to the Dutch square, which contained a Dutch church, the Stadthuys (city hall), and, of course, a windmill.

After poking our head into the Dutch church, we headed to Bukit St. Paul, or St. Paul's Hill.  On top of the hill were the ruins of a church that was originally built by the Portuguese, and was later used as a fortress and lighthouse by the British.  The church contained one of my favorite things to look at when I'm travelling - old gravestones!  (Seriously, I don't know where this interest came from.  I blame my parents for taking us to the old cemeteries in Boston while there on a trip; my brother and I proceeded to laugh at the names of the dead people (our favorite was Dorcus) and had a grand old time, and from there my obsession was born.)

We then climbed down the other side of the hill to visit the remains of the A Famosa fortress, built by the Portuguese in the early 1500s.  Originally, the fortress formed a 3 meter thick wall around the entire settlement, but here is all that is left of it now:

Finally, we visited the Istana, or the royal palace, of the Sultan of Malacca.  Here is a picture of his grand meeting hall:

I love museums with really hokey dioramas like these.  Another exhibit I really liked is this one, which depicts some legend of an epic duel.  It shows the earliest known example of Matrix-style fighting:

Unfortunately, we didn't have much time to look around here, since we had to get back to the bus station to catch our bus to Singapore.  In our mad dash through town looking for a taxi, we went by this museum:

I originally thought this was a body modification museum, but after a quick google search by Chris it turns out that it portrays the "differing concepts of beauty as practiced by different cultures".  The description is pretty admirable because they write two paragraphs about the museum, and use this quote in literally every sentence.

Overall, Malaysia, and especially KL, was a lot less sketchy than I expected.  It felt like being in the more shady parts of Singapore, which are really not very shady overall.  At no point did I feel worried about getting my bags snatched on the street or getting robbed by a taxi driver.  Another thing that surprised me was the large number of white tourists in KL.  I guess it's a more popular European travel destination, but I don't think I know any Americans who have traveled there.  Finally, especially in light of the large numbers of tourists, I was surprised at how few Malaysians (outside of the service industries) spoke English.  Especially in Malacca, we had to ask around quite a bit to find someone who spoke some English and could help us out with figuring out directions, etc.  Overall, I really enjoyed Malaysia, and wished that I had more time to hit some of the smaller towns, including Malacca again...maybe a return trip sometime in the future?