6/03/10 – 6/05/10 (sanur)
Annie Lin
Sanur – Kuala Lumpur
We keep telling ourselves not to book 6am flights since they can be a bit brutal to wake up so early in the morning and usually our travel days takes up the whole day. But sometimes they are the cheapest flights so it is a hard choice. Our driver picked us up at 4:30am for our flight to Kuala Lumpur (KL). It was our first flight on Air Asia, which is the budget airline most people use to travel around southeast Asia. For such an early morning flight the plane was pretty packed. There were quite a few Muslim females in Bali and Lombok wearing headdresses but none in complete headdress covered from head to toe with only their eyes showing. There was a woman on our flight who had on the black headdress from head to toe with only her eyes showing. Because every part of her body was covered you really took notice to her eyes, which were hazel. I felt bad staring at her but it was more out of curiosity about her faith and culture. For example, I wondered if the airport security would ask her take off her headdress when she pass through the security gates and at what age do they start wearing one. It made me realize how little I knew about their society and wished I could ask her some questions.
After a short flight we were in KL and headed to our hotel. When we arrived at our hotel we were informed that our reservation had not been confirmed and they were fully booked since it was the school holiday season. After a frustrated battle we were able to get a room at the discounted internet rate. Later we found out that we had entered the wrong dates for our reservation and they sent us an email asking us to correct our dates. Oops. We felt bad that we caused such a scene in the lobby and smiled warmly at reception every time we passed by.
We stayed in Bukit Bintang, a pretty busy part of town with people offering massages all along the road and at night the food market was bustling. One night we had dinner at one of the night markets. The restaurant tables spilled out onto the road and the police had to ask some restaurants to put away some of their tables because it was blocking the traffic. Every place tried to entice you with their menu and since the cooking was done outside the aroma from the food permeated the streets. There were also fruit stalls and I was very excited to see my favorite fruit called the wax apple. I loved eating the wax apple as a kid in Taiwan and before leaving KL we bought some for our bus trip.
We visited the Petronas Towers, which is a major icon in KL and at one time was the tallest building in the world. We went at dusk and saw the lights come on around the building. There was also a mall with about five floors dedicated to any kind of electronics you could ever want. Jon was a kid in a candy store and I’m sure he would’ve been quite content staying there all day and night.
One of the craziest experiences we had was booking our bus to Cameron Highlands. The bus depot was under construction so it was temporarily moved to the outskirt of the city. We had to take several trains to get there and the depot wasn’t like anything we had ever seen. There were about fifty bus companies each with their own booth crammed into a small building. When you walked in all of them started yelling at you to come visit their booth. All the companies offered similar routes and prices so it was really hard to decide which one to pick. We finally picked one based on the departure time that suited our schedule.
Another interesting observation is the huge Chinese population in Malaysia and many of them speak a dialect called Fu Kinese (don’t know the correct spelling) which sounds a lot like Taiwanese. Most people I encountered spoke Malay Chinese, a slightly different dialect of Mandarin, but we were still able to converse quite comfortably.
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