This will be a very short post, since we’ve been in Kuala Lumpur for all of about 16 hours and are in the airport now, waiting for our flight to Hanoi. Unfortunately, during our time here, we had a couple of travel mishaps, both taxi related. On the way from the airport into town, our taxi driver got pulled over for running a red light (he was, on every level, an absolute psycho), then dropped us off in the totally wrong part of town. We were staying at our friend Jen’s place near the downtown core, but got dropped off about 2 km away in a somewhat seedy neighbourhood. Some aimless wandering, a sign language dotted conversation and another $10 cab ride later, we finally arrived at Jen’s place. Unfortunately she’s actually out of town on business, so we walked around the downtown core on our own. I was truly struck by the modernity of the city; the skyline is full of sparkling new glass buildings, the most famous being the Petronas Buildings, depicted below.

I’m sure that when you have some time to explore, there are lots of interesting things to do in Kuala Lumpur – but since it was about 4 p.m. when we arrived in town, we were rather restricted to the corporate downtown core, so decided to take advantage of the local mall’s offerings – we watched Inception (which was was pretty good!) and went to California Pizza Kitchen. More New Jersey than Malaysia, but it was fascinating to see how affluent and Westernized Kuala Lumpur is; there are even American-style suburbs encircling the city – a far cry from rural Indonesia!   

We had a 6:30 a.m. flight, so got up at 4 a.m. Unfortunately, this is where the mishap #2 came into play. Our cab driver dropped us off at the wrong terminal for our Air Asia flight. In most airports this wouldn’t be an issue, you’d simply walk or take a 3-minute train ride to the correct terminal. In Kuala Lumpur, however, the other terminal is 20 km away, so we missed our flight. As such, we’ve been hanging out at the ‘Old Town White Coffee‘ shop for three hours, waiting for our new flight to Hanoi at 10:45 (another 2 hours from now). Kuala Lumpur is a dynamic, impressive Asian city on the rise, but it’s cab drivers certainly leave something to be desired.

Palms in the central city park