After another amazing month spent at Woodford Folk Festival, meeting old friends and new, experiencing a new area of set up as this time I worked on the street lighting crew, it was time to leave Australia once again and make my way back to Asia, the continent where my travels began three and a half years ago.
It was nearing midnight when I stepped foot on Malaysian soil. Having spent the majority of the day couped up in Bali airport, and the remaining time inside one aeroplane or another, I was a little tired, longing to look up and see the sky and most definitely to become horizontal as quickly as possible (preferably on my hostel bed).
I can’t say it was the smoothest start I’ve had to entering a country. It took several ATMs before I found one willing to give me money, on top of that, the carousel had stopped by the time I reached it and my bag nowhere to be seen (it turned out to be amongst the pile of bags on the other side, rather than the pile of bags on the side I’d been stood – as I said, I was a little tired…) Things did improve as I made my way from the airport, successfully caught the cheapest bus to town and was dropped round the corner from my hostel an hour later.
I felt a strange sense of comfort entering and seeing a large collection of shoes to my right, a tradition in many countries in Asia is to remove footwear on entering a house. Though at nearly 4am, I had little energy to really linger and enjoy my immediate surroundings and quickly scampered (/plodded) up the multiple flights of stairs to my bed.
It wasn’t until the following afternoon as I took a short walk around the city that my location began to hit home. I’d stopped to admire a building and trees on the other side of the river and suddenly became aware of a brilliantly white mosque just to my right, so different from any architecture I have experienced in recent years.
I managed just a few hours to take in some of the colour and architectural beauty Kuala Lumpur has to offer. Having read about this in the guidebook, it is more likely my eyes were more ready to notice that my walk around town took me past mosques, temples and churches in quick succession, representations of the main religions of the country, Muslim, Buddhist and Catholic.
My final exploration for the day took me through Chinatown in search of food. Bustling market streets, a mixture of street food stalls, clothes vendors and more permanent food stands and restaurants, all with the plastic chairs and fold out tables typical of standard Asian eateries. Before long I’d enjoyed a sweet potato bao (a sweet steamed bread bun of sorts), some vegetable sticky rice and had a bag full of fruit to take away.
Plans to explore the botanical gardens later in the afternoon never emerged as I let the tiredness engulf me and had tucked myself away in bed by 19:30. Still adjusting to the change in pace from much of my lifestyle over the past few years and fighting against exhaustion with sore and swollen glands, I planned to head out early to the Cameron Highlands the next morning, in desperate search of open spaces and some country air.
