The Monday that we departed Singapore for Malaysia’s Capital Kuala Lumpur happened to fall on my Birthday, meaning that whilst Katy got to send her Birthday in the chocolate museum, I got to spend mine on a 6 hour bus ride. It’s a cruel world…

Anyway, a bit of birthday fortune smiled of us as at last, for the first time in our 7 months of galivanting around the world, we had a pleasant experience on a bus. We arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the late afternoon and caught a taxi across town to Birdsnest hostel on the outskirts of China Town. After having more than a week of temples, Grand Prix’s and walking and walking and walking, we decided on a bit of downtime for our first couple of days in KL. Instead we caught up on The Great British bake-off and The Handmaids Tale whilst relaxing on the roof terrace with the iguanas (I bet nobody’s ever used that sentence before).

Kualar Lumpur, which in Malay means ‘Muddy Estuary’, is currently in the midst of a rather nasty bout of haze; heavy pollution caused by the burning off of vegetation in Indonesia. It happens about this time every year, but this year it’s particularly bad and limits visibility to about a mile or so whilst giving the air a strangely twilight quality, even in the middle of the day. The haze has quite serious long-term health implications for those who live here and as such people are being advised to limit the time they’re spending outside and some schools and public offices have been closed. Those in the city for a few days needn’t worry though, and actually it did help us feel a little less guilty about not getting out and seeing the sights since couldn’t see them anyway.

KL is a huge, bustling and somewhat disjointed city, sprawling between a number of small hills without a clear centre, but compared to other capital cities with visited (With the exception of Singapore) it is pretty clean, spacious and easy to get around. Rapid and ongoing urban development gives it a remarkably modern feel with a well-developed metro system, well-kept public parks and glass-clad skyscrapers popping up from seemingly every street corner. Malaysia is a majority Muslim country, but the constitution explicitly protects freedom of religion for the country’s myriad minority groups and as such the city is an enthralling fusion of the cultures and religions that make the country what it is, permeating every aspect of the city from the street food and the architecture, to the faint soundtrack of calls to prayer and the extortionate price of beer.

By the time we got to our last day in KL the haze had cleared a little and we headed to KLCC park in the centre of the business district to visit the city’s most iconic landmark; the Petronas Towers. At 452 meters tall, they were the tallest buildings in the world when they were completed in 1997, holding the record until 2004 when they were surpassed by Tapei 101 in Taiwan. I remember seeing pictures of the tower when they were first completed, sticking out like beacons amongst the low, grey apartment buildings, tightly-packed industrial complexes and slums. The Petronas Towers were somewhat a statement of intent from a poor but fast-developing nation, and it’s impressive what’s been achieved in such a short period of time. Today, the towers just about peak out from the swathes of sky-scrapers, malls and new housing complexes surrounding them. Within a few years they will no longer be the tallest towers in KL, such is the pace of development in this part of the world.

We worked our way in to the building in the late afternoon and headed to the visitor entrance in the basement of the north tower. From there we were escorted through the airport-style security and in to one of the buildings 38 lifts to take us to the 40^th floor where the two towers are connected by an enclosed two-story glass and steel sky-bridge. Here we were given 15 minutes to enjoy the view and play around with the two large interactive screens that inform you about the other buildings that can be seen from this vantage point.  The view from here was already pretty spectacular, watching the traffic hundreds of meters below us, and it was bizarre to think that we weren’t even halfway up! The view was rather restricted by the towers either side of us, although it was a great vantage point from which to get a true sense of the sale of the buildings and what an impressive feat of engineering they are as they disappear out of view above the roof of the bridge.

Following this we were escorted back to the lifts and sent on our way up to the 86^th floor, which is a dedicated viewing level complete with a small museum about the tower’s construction and a gift shop. At 375 meters up in the air, this was by quite some way the highest I’d ever been up in a human-made structure. It’s high enough that you don’t even think about the height when you look out, like the part of your mind that would be alarmed by being so high up just can’t process what it’s seeing and shuts off. The view from here was, well, it’s been a long time coming, but finally, after 7 months of travelling, we have been unlucky with the weather. The haze, which had receded to an extent earlier in the day blended with the greying clouds of the passing rain shower to severely restrict our view. That wasn’t to say we couldn’t see anything, but anything more than a couple of miles away was little more than a grey silhouette (and from that height, a couple of miles visibility isn’t very much). It wasn’t as good as it could’ve been but hey, we’re British, appreciating things despite the weather is in our DNA, and it was still a remarkable view, especially as the light began to fade and the city began to glow below us.

The following morning, we set off from KL to the island of Penang, which markets itself as the ‘pearl of the orient (one of many places to do so, I’m sure I’ve heard that strapline before). We caught the train from the old central station just across the river from The Birdsnest and set off on our 4 hour ride up northwest along the peninsula, wishing we’d known ahead of time how bloody cold it would have been on board (it was probably about 24C, but to us these days that’s practically freezing). We arrived at the wonderfully named ‘Butterworth Station’ and once we had thawed out from our refrigeration made our way to the ferry port to head over to the city of George Town on Penang Island.

The island, which is just over 100 square miles in size and lies about 2 miles off the coast of the mainland, was formerly part of the Sultanate of Kedah until the late 18^th century when control of the island was ceded to the East India Company in exchange for British military protection against Burma and Siam. The EIC used the island as a trading post with India and China and in so doing founded the city of Georgetown on the islands north-eastern tip. Today, Penang Island, along with a roughly similar sized stretch of the coastline, form the federal state of Penang, one of the 13 states of modern Malaysia. The island is home to about 750,000 people making George Town Malaysia’s second biggest city and a growing hub for domestic and international tourism.

After freezing on the train and getting drenched by the sudden monsoon rains that pelted the ferry as we made our way across the strait of Penang, we were really rather looking forward to spending a week unwinding in the Airbnb we had booked ourselves. The old-quarter of George Town up near the port is still home to many original colonial buildings, but the urban sprawl to the south of the and all along the Eastern coast the island is dominated by high-rise apartment buildings, amongst which was housed our AirBnB on the 29^th floor facing out north over the old town and the Penang strait.

For the next week then we made leisurely work of exploring the town, the hills in the centre of the island and the full range of the wonderful sushi restaurant on the ground floor of the building we were staying in, all whilst contributing healthily to Malaysia’s economy by virtue of the ‘sin tax’ applied to the beer we were buying from the local 7/11.

In the centre of George Town and dominating the skyline is the 68 story Komptar Tower, which was expanded a few years ago to include a new viewing platform and rooftop bar as well as an indoor theme park around the base. We spent the best part of a day here being entertained and, at times, completely bemused by the hap-hazard mix of genuinely entertaining and comically terrible attractions such as the definitely-not-a-jurrasic-park-ripoff ‘Jurassic Research Centre’. The JRC (cool acronym, I’ll give them that) starts with a short briefing from a legitimate palaeontologist explaining an actor spouting nonsense about the dinosaurs we were about to see, warning us not to feed them or get too close, lest they eat us! Onward we ventured then into a small museum section filled with plaster-cast replicas of unspecified bones and some inaccurate information about dinosaurs, before proceeding to the ‘dinosaur hospital’ where actors is lab coats tended to a model of a stegosaurus and we had the wonderful opportunity to pet a baby dinosaur. Very surreal. Next we went outside into the courtyard of the tower to find a small enclosure filled with anatomically suspect animatronic dinosaurs whose cheap rubbery body parts oscillated unnervingly every time they moved, all the while accompanied by a tinny looping soundtrack of roaring and squawking effects definitely not lifted from the Jurassic Park films. It was a very strange and beautifully awful experience and we couldn’t stop laughing pretty much the whole way through.

Other highlights of our day included the Durian Experience, the Pirates 7D(!?) Cinema, The Magical Carousel (where the C wwas so heavily styalised that it looked like the ride was called ‘Magical Arousel’) and the World of Mirrors (there were more than 17, to be fair). All in all, it was £20 very, very well spent, especially as all around the ‘theme park’ were unnerving waxwork look-a-likes of celebrities as well as copious amounts of Halloween theming. As an aside, we’ve been genuinely surprised that in a Majority Muslim country with sizeable Chinese and Indian minorities has embraced Halloween to the extent that it has. It’s everywhere! Even though it’s still a month away, every commercial district has decorations up and are advertising special Halloween events. Its reassuringly secular if nothing else, I guess.

We capped off the days…unique… experience by making our way to the top of the tower to admire the view. It’s not quite Petronas Towers, but it’s still pretty good. Also, the top of the building is home to MALAYSIA’S ONE AND ONLY GLASS-BOTTOMED RAINBROW BRIDGE ATTACHED TO A BUILDING!!! Which was also pretty cool, if somewhat over-hyped. Overall, and despite the curmudgeonly cynicism which I hope is conveyed here, it was a good laugh, and a nice change of pace from the usual tourism we had been doing.

Our final day in Penang started with a walking tour around the old town. Penang tourism board provides this as a free service, employing a licensed guide (Our guide, Ron, was very keen to point out that he had one of these) to take tourists around the city. As a free tour we had to ensure we were at the starting point in the Tourist Information centre before 10am to register, and it’s a good job we did, as the 20 available places were quickly filled and by the time the tour started at 10:30, as many people again had been turned away. Lord knows what it’s like in the high season, you’d probably need to be there about 5am (I’m just proofreading this blog aloud to Katy who would like to point out that this was HER joke so she may receive appropriate credit).

Our tour took us on a whistle-stop tour of some of George Towns more interesting historic sites, including the house of the former Chinese Mafia chief, the oldest still standing building in the city, the Kapitan Kelling Mosque -noteworthy because it has Stars of David integrated into the architecture- and Han Jiang Ancestral Temple, built by Chinese Teochew migrants in the early 20^th century. As we made our way around Ron regaled us with the history of the city, focussing on the migratory waves of the many communities that make up modern Penang and how they organised their lives and interacted with each other, as well as the lingering effects of British Colonialism. There were also some insights into modern Penang and how it expresses itself, most notably through the murals and street art that can be found all around the old town.

Having been to countries that were once part of the Spanish and French empires, it’s interesting now to come to one that was part of the British and to see the impact that that has had on the culture here. It shows up in some obvious ways, such as driving on the left, the 3-prong plug sockets, the ready availability of Cadbury’s chocolate and the red telephone and post boxes, to the more idiosyncratic; understanding the value of orderly queueing, people saying ‘sorry’ when they inadvertently bump in to each other and the little white-on-brown road signs for tourist information. Also, English is very widely spoken here, Malay is the official language but there are so many ethnic minorities here that don’t speak Malay that English has become the de-facto lingua franca. Most people speak Malay and English, or Tamil and English, or Mandarin and English and so English is the go-between for locals and foreigners alike. It’s kind of a microcosm of Asia as a whole and perhaps a window on to what much of the world will be like in another couple of generations.

Once our tour was over, we had some lunch to escape the increasing intensity of the midday sun and then caught a taxi over to the base of Penang Hill, the 830 meter high peak of the ridge of hills that dissect the centre of the island. At the base of the hill we boarded the Penang Hill railway, a Funicular railway which was built in 2010, replacing an older and smaller Funicular built by the British in the early 20^th Century. The ride is part tourist attraction and part transport infrastructure and can get you to the top of the hill in about 5 minutes, which is good, because the staff really cram you in. Still, it’s novel and fun way to travel.

Once at the top the drop in temperature and humidity is really noticeable. The British built the Funicular originally to be able to easily access the gardens and country retreats they were busy building at the top. It’s easy to see why the location appealed so much, it’s cool, relatively dry and has a very pleasant sea breeze. The British Colonials even established a number of hospitals at the top for those suffering from tropical diseases.

At the top are numerous attractions to enjoy, ranging from the sky walk and several restaurants, through to a ‘zombie apocalypse’ (no idea) and the misleadingly named ‘Owl Museum’. We were here however to engage in something far more wholesome, visiting ‘The Habitat’ a very well kept and well-presented nature reserve that features several suspended paths through the canopy as well as an elevated looping walkway that sits atop the highest point of the hill. From the walkway it was possible to see all the way around the island and as far as the mainland in the distance in all it’s hazy glory. Sadly, we couldn’t spend to long up there as a thunderstorm was rolling in, and being on top of a large metal walkway suspended by tall metal supports on top of the highest point for miles around struck us as a profoundly bad idea.

We continued through the nature reserve and were lucky enough to see some of the local Langur Monkeys (they have a reputation for weeing on people, so we kept our distance) and a vine snake which I nearly sat on. The rains held off long enough for us to safely get back to the Funicular station and get back down to the bottom of the hill, and we rounded off our time in Penang by again having Sushi from the restaurant downstairs

It really is good sushi!