Downtown KL

I made a made a mistake buying my train ticket to KL when I got here. Turns out the bus is cheaper, leaves from town, and the guesthouse manager would have got the ticket for me. As it was I missed the bus to Tampas, where the train station is, so I had to take a taxi for RM50. Expensive.

The train ride was uneventful, and I arrived in the shiny new KL Central Station right on schedule an hour late at 6 pm. Most guesthouses are in Chinatown, but Lonely Planet says there is a nice one in the Golden Triangle. They make it easy to take a taxi since you buy a coupon for where you want to go and give it to the driver, avoiding haggling. He didn't know where the street was, but eventually found it, and it was worth it, because the place is really nice. I splurged and paid the extra 3 Ringitts to get an AC dorm for RM15, or US$3.50.

Two blocks from the guesthouse is a whole street of vendors selling Chinese food from stalls. After walking around confused for awhile a hawker called me over, so I ordered something from her called a curry mee (I later learned "mee" means noodles) and a honeydew juice. It turned out to be one of those bowls of soup with noodles and chunks of stuff that you eat with chopsticks and a spoon. It was delicious, and all told was RM6. The juices are great too. For 1 Ringitt they will whip up a fresh juice for you. So far I've tried honeydew, watermelon, sugar cane, coconut, and rosemary. The food's great, but you have to put up with the Chinese people spitting all the time. And not just simple spitting, they'll often hock up huge luggies. I guess the Chinese have phlegm problems.

Then I walked to the Petronas Towers, the tallest buildings in the world, and took the obligatory photos. There's a six-level shopping mall at the bottom. It's impressive that everything is open late here, once again unlike Sydney. The city seems alive at all hours. I took the clean, modern LRT to Chinatown to check out the night market. It was blocks and blocks of venders filling the streets selling tee-shirts, CDs, DVDs of movies that are still in cinemas, watches, jewelry, Windows XP, you name it. It was hot and packed with people, so I had to resort to more fresh fruit juice.

On a corner of Bukit Bintang, the main street in the Golden Triangle, guys come up to me every time I walk by at night and ask quietly if I am looking for a young lady. One even asked if I need ladies. I guess he had a two for one deal going.