Georgetown and KL

Malaysia’s quite a nice place, innit?

We’re in Kuala Lumpur now, and a few days ago we were in Georgetown on Penang. Talk about different. Georgetown is very much a provincial capital. Kuala Lumpur most definitely isn’t.

There’s not a huge amount to do in Georgetown. We had a look round the ruins of the old fort and the museum, but we’re both well past the point of wanting to see any more museums for at least a few months. We also took the train to the top of Penang Hill and walked back down, meeting lots of wild monkeys on the way. We even got snarled at by one of them when we got a bit too close to his family. We decided to leave them to it after that. At the bottom of the hill we walked past the entrance to the botanical gardens where there were even more monkeys hassling the tourists for food. All that and eating at a very nice street restaurant pretty much wrapped up Georgetown.

Oh, I forgot. While we were walking back from that street restaurant, we walked past a temple just as someone inside it started pounding away at a drum. As we were standing on the road wondering what it was, we were invited inside by someone who was walking in, and ended up watching a couple of people practicing their lion dancing. I don’t think they had been doing it for long, as they kept falling off the stools and benches they were balancing on and then falling around laughing at each other. Dead impressive, though, even if it wasn’t perfect.

We ended up flying from Penang to KL. The trains were fully booked, and the only other option was 8 or 9 hours on a bus, so we went for the 50 minute, budget carrier flight. Yes, I know it’s another flight in our train journey. If it counts for anything, I had less legroom on the flight than I would have had on the bus.

I think the short flight is why I had so many problems getting my head around the difference in the two cities. I spent most of the first evening in KL wandering round doing my best “wide-eyed tourist” impression. We’re staying in the Golden Triangle part of KL, which seems to be the big shopping part of town. Brand new malls that don’t close till midnight, monorail running overhead, people everywhere, bright lights and camera crews filming stuff, and street performers all over the place. Georgetown’s got a long way to go before it even starts to come close.

In between the rainstorms, we’ve been to the Petronas Towers (but failed to get there early enough to get one of the 1400 available tickets), been to the top of the KL tower, wandered round the edges of Little India and Chinatown and been to the cinema. We’re still planning to go to the Batu Caves before we leave for Singapore in a couple of days. Hopefully it’ll stop raining for long enough to let us get there.