📸 — Kuala Lumpur, Malysia

Published in

A Little Detour

10 min readMar 21, 2019

😃 A Little Detour continues! We started planning part two more thoroughly than our previous adventures because the timeline was shorter (we’re thinking 3 months) and have a list of things we want to achieve.

Initially, the goal was to hit places that we didn’t have the opportunity to visit last time around (Nepal, India etc.) and push ourselves to walk more of the unbeaten path.

With this in mind we booked flights to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as a starting point so we could be more nibble with better flight options as a major international hub/airport in Asia.

But after 4 days of planning in Calgary, things got a little complicated. Pakistan and India have been in conflict involving border bombings and fighter jets being shot down. 😥 Combined with the other issue that they’re having elections (we’ve learned our lesson from the Honduras episode), we deemed it was better to be safe than sorry and 2 days before our departure cancelled our plans to visit India.

We had an open itinerary again — which felt a bit weird after the planning we had for the first two months of our travels. But after a long flight we arrived in Malaysia to kick start something new.

Here is our extended stay in Kuala Lumpur and some of the stuff we did.

See more on our website www.alittledetour.ca🌏✈️👫

YYC > DEN > NRT > KUL — This is the first time we saw Mt Fuji on the horizon, as we flew over Japan (image on the right)

Maeghan recently got a new iPhone and didn’t realize that she would have been better off with an older phone. During the 11 hour flight, she wasn’t able to connect to the entertainment system. Further, she couldn’t charge her phone and use the headset at the same time 😒She ended up buying new/old headphones.

Going to bed at 9pm and waking up at 6am due to jet lag has perks, like first to breakfast.

KL is this cool mix of old/broken and new/tall. It looks like there are multiple “downtown” cores spread out all over the city.

There’s a hole in the bridge. Should I be scared?

More than any other place we’ve travelled, Maeghan receives a lot of stares and attention. Within 24 hours, she was asked to be in a handful of pictures and videos at various destinations on our city walk. Maybe she looks like someone famous here?

Being coached on how to pose. I think 15–20 pictures were taken.

Tower views of the city. You can see the various high rise clusters that look like individual “downtowns”.

We had booked in advance tickets to the Petronas Twin Towers and didn’t realize it was for the first day. So we got to enjoy most of the day in tall buildings with air conditioning which was good since our bodies were used to -20 degrees, not +37.

The Petronas Twin Towers are the largest twin towers in the world. One tower is office space, observation deck and has a skywalk between the two buildings. The other is all owned by the Oil company Petronas. It is a very impressive site and we enjoyed it at all hours of the day (for sunset with the lights or during the daytime in all it’s business glory).

The main two things to do in Malaysia are to eat & shop. I’ve never seen so many fancy shopping malls so close together with a large variety of amazing food. Malaysia is like Singapore in the sense of its mix of cultures. There is a large Chinese, Indian and Malay community here which offers the best selection of food and cultural corners of the city.

The shopping malls are unreal. Some are open to the outdoors and pump air conditioning like their life depended on it. Also the design and selection is abundant!

Maeghan would like this in her future home…

This was one large Japanese department store that had an “experience” for every floor.

Maeghan is a BIG fan of stationary. She journals and likes to reminisce about her school days. Asia always has amazing stationary stores and so well organized.

Some boys throwing flowers into the water. No idea why, but they were sure having fun.

Walking around the streets of KL, you will be surrounded by ginormous apartments and buildings. It’s worth looking up to see crazy penthouses, pools and SO many helicopter pads.

This building looks like an evil character HQ.

Checking out the many street food markets

We took a day trip out to the Batu Caves, a temple carved inside the limestone mountain. The cave is one of the most popular Tamil shrines outside India, and is dedicated to Lord Murugan. Driving up to the caves, it smells in abundance of fresh flowers and spices.

A pigeon flew by Maeghan’s head (left) and she reacted not realizing how far away it actually was.

There were monkeys, chickens, cats, bats, pigeons all hanging out and harassing the tourists.

Many people came with colour powder on their head, or over their face to celebrate. It was beautiful to watch.

We had some Indian food for lunch. It was awesome.

We did some walking around the skywalk ways — most were air conditioned and walked in way too many malls.

We stayed at a guesthouse that had a fellow Canadian running some of the excursions so we tagged along for a hike in the area. It was a pretty sketchy/unmarked hike — but the tide pool and views were awesome.

This hike was along the longest mountain/hill range of limestone supported by quartz gemstone. The entire hike we kept finding some along the trail.

Hiking with 98% humidity is pretty uncomfortable, but we made it to the top of the 3rd mountain peak.

Bubz the stray dog hiked all the way up with us and followed us back to the tide pool.

It is really incredible to be in a place that a temple, a mosque and a church are all across the street from each other. The acceptance and respect for religion and culture is beautiful.

On our last night, we went out for a traditional Malay dinner but on the way stopped by the future 3rd tallest building in the world. Above is the design of it, below (image on right) is what is currently built and is only the parking lot… the mall/school/office space portion of the building hasn’t even started yet!

We wondered why there was so much construction and so many high-rise buildings were being built… did it mean that there was that much demand for housing?.. but what we learned is that all these projects where paid for / approved in the boom of the economy that was largely riding the oil price wave. The price and demand has dropped significantly but the buildings are being built and left empty hoping for a turn in demand.