Day 12 – Out and about in KL

Sarah here again, folks.  It just hasn’t been Alan’s day. Grumble grumble growl.

We had a reasonable night of sleep until we realised this morning that we can hear the building’s elevators from here.  Apparently Alan could hear them last night but I didn’t notice them. However, when you’re trying to sleep, they can be very annoying.

Because of this we left the room by 9.15am. One of our earliest starts yet. We took a walk up to where we ate last night and bought tickets for the hop on hop off bus.  This is where our day started to go wrong.  All the information we had read, told us that this was a good hop on hop off bus.  We do them usually most places we go because it gives us an overview of the city and, of course, we can get off and on whenever we like.

The bus was uncomfortable; no leg room at all, the windows were dirty so hard to take photos out of, is supposed to have a recorded commentary that you can listen through headphones but 80% of the headphones don’t work and the air conditioning was barely working. The seats are really small; nowhere near wide enough for our big bums. They go around in circles covering the same area numerous times on occasions. There are four buses on the route and pick up is supposed to be between every 15 and 30 minutes.  The map they gave was pretty basic but it did list the stops and what can be done there. Unfortunately some aren’t labelled appropriately, which we later discovered.

We got off at stop 14 and went to the orchid garden but, unfortunately, there was hardly anything flowering.


Supposedly at the same stop was the butterfly park but, as we discovered, that should have been the stop before, which required us to walk quite some distance in the heat.  The park was pretty and had other things other than butterflies like turtles, fish, some really scary looking things like scorpions and spiders etc.

      
After walking back to the closest stop, stop 13, we waited for 30 minutes for a bus to arrive.  We sat downstairs this time because of the lack of air conditioning and upstairs the windows don’t open and the roof is made of glass too.  The driver of this bus was dreadful and I don’t think he ever made it out of first gear. We were going to stop 22 and it took a hour.  The guy was so slow that the bus 30 minutes behind us caught up, which of course screwed up the timing for the buses for the rest of the day.

By this time it was 1.15pm and we’d had nothing to eat or drink all day.  We quickly found our way to a shopping centre and looked for a food hall. Actually a store directory would have been a start but we couldn’t find one of those.  We ended up travelling up four levels to find a food hall that was so packed you could barely move.  Finally, we located what I’m sure was the only store directory and we were then in the lift on our way to Burger King. Thankfully it wasn’t too busy so we ate and had a well needed drink.

After that we went back outside and walked around the Petronas Twin Towers and took some photos.  We then, begrudgingly, got back on the hop on hop off bus and returned to the stop we originally started at, although this took another 30 or so minutes. We keep being stalked by a bunch of annoying Koreans plus a family of Australian bogans everywhere we went today.

We then came back to the hotel, using our shortcut we found this morning cutting about 5 minutes off the walk.  We stopped by the pool area and decided, yes, a swim would be in order.  It was 3.30pm by this time.  Alan will complain that the water was too cold but I loved it. It was freezing. Probably around 12 degrees. I only got in for 2 minutes because I didn’t feel like having a shower tonight. It wasn’t that cold.  Probably like 25 and was something I’ve been looking forward to for days; a cool refreshing swim.  The pools in Langkawi were way too warm.

The cloud was quickly rolling in by this time and, back in our room, we watched the storm come over.  In the course of 5 minutes the visibility was cut from about 10kms to the stage where I could just see the buildings on the next block. Then came the thunder and lightning and then loss of internet.

Alan was in the middle of his weekly online poker tournament so he’s not impressed.  We finally thought about the free wi-fi at the place we had dinner last night, so this is where we are now … a little wet but here. And of course I hurt my ankle walking here. Unfortunately he had been blinded out by the time we got here. Poor Alan. Where are my satay skewers? They seem to have forgotten them. Typical!

Thankfully the storm seems to have subsided so we might get back to the hotel a little drier.  Let’s just say, my little umbrella isn’t made for two.