Beautiful KL

As I said in the last post, we each picked one thing to do before the year was over.  My pick was going to Borneo!  I had heard great things about the island, and after researching it a bit more, three things in particular stood out for me.  First, I wanted to see Kuala Lumpur – it is a really big city made famous by the twin Petronas towers.  Second, I wanted to scuba dive Sipadan, known as one of the finest sites in the world to dive, with sharks and turtles everywhere.  Third, the Kinabatangan River has loads of wildlife that is easily visible because of the palm oil plantations that are slowly removing all the jungle habitat around the river (only 1km on each side is protected).  These three things turned out to make a really great Malaysian adventure!

It wasn’t easy at first.  We ended up having a really tiring day and weren’t completely with it by the time we arrived in KL.  I had it all planned out – fly down to Singapore, then grab the overnight train to Kuala Lumpur, where we’d spend a few days.  Singapore was cool, the airport was really nice and even had free wifi!  Since we had so little time in the city, we decided to hang out in the airport and get some business done on the computer for a while, before heading off to the train station.  We grabbed a delicious vegetarian-Indian dinner at the airport (we didn’t know it at the time, but we were in for some DELICIOUS Indian food in this part of the world), caught the subway to the northernmost subway station, then took a bus to the Woodlands train checkpoint, where we waited for about an hour to go through customs and get on the train.  All in all we travelled for about 24 hours, and arrived quite early in Kuala Lumpur, but we made it.

The first thing we did was to check out the city.  We left our bags in a locker in the train station and set off with the cameras to downtown.  We were in for a bit of a treat, since it was Deepavali (Diwali in the USA) and there were amazing colored-rice artworks all over the place.  Between that and the spectacular Petronas Towers, there was a lot to see!

Deepavali Decorations

Impressive KL Tower

Even More Impressive Petronas Towers

The next day we went out to see the Batu Caves, accessible by train from KL and an interesting Hindu shrine built right into a large cave system.  Highlights included the huge statue, long stairway, and monkeys inside:

Batu Caves Entrance

Shrine in Cave

Monkeys Like Fast Food Too

The highlight of this day trip turned out not to be the caves, however impressive they were, because afterwards we treated ourselves to the most delicious Indian food of the trip – right outside the caves.  We got rice and dosa in curry sauce and it was really really delicious!  And cheap! Woohoo!

Curry my Heart

Happy Deepavali!

The last attraction at Kuala Lumpur was the orchid garden, which we spent an hour browsing while waiting for our flight to Tawau (see Part 2 of Justin’s Last Big Thing!).  It was not the best season, with lots of non-flowering plants, but some of them were beautiful nonetheless.

Orchid Garden