Kuala Lumpur city tour 2 - 30/10/2006

The National Museum was not very impressive (old and some parts very dirty) and museums are not my thing at all. The only reason I went is because we were in Malaysia. By this time, due to the extreme heat, I was ready for the loo so went in search of a toilet. When I discovered that they charge to let you in, I had to find Dion to get some money. They also charge for toilet paper! I don’t mind paying to pee BUT then the toilets must be clean and they were not. I will just say that my thigh muscles received a nice workout because I could not sit on those filthy seats. At one point I left Dion looking at museum-type stuff and I went to the shop (much more my style) where I got us some wooden bookmarks with pewter animals inlaid. I felt like a real fuddy duddy in the shop at one point because there were like stacks of children and they were all making such a noise and I found myself involuntarily saying “sshhh” to which they all went “sshhh” to one another (is there an echo in here?)

The war memorial however was probably for me the best part of the tour. First off, it is housed in absolutely beautiful gardens so you have to walk quite a way to get to the statue. I could easily have spent another 30 minutes there, just looking at that beauty.

The memorial itself is in the middle of a pool with lots of Jacuzzi-like jets of water spouting periodically. Absolutely gorgeous.

I love running water, any running water. In fact, right now I’m typing this on my laptop next to the pool where our water feature is providing the perfect accompaniment to this beautiful day – okay, I just took a picture now to show you).

We took some nice pictures and our Sri Lankan friends took this weird picture of us. He was into strange shots and I must say this turned out well.

(There were old people on the tour with us who couldn’t walk very much and after about an hour of on and off the bus, they just sat on the bus. I found this quite sad because you save up your money to visit other countries and then you can’t even appreciate the country properly because of health issues, SO take care of your health!)

I can remember virtually nothing about this part because it is blocked out because I was so cross. The bus stops somewhere. The guy said we have 10 minutes before we move on – fine. Dion and I cross the road and walk around taking pictures (oh, now I remember – it’s where the two rivers meet – that’s what Kuala Lumpur means) and I then said that we’ve got to get back so we can get there in the 10 minutes. The robot took forever so we were a little bit late but the guy saw us standing and waiting for a green light.

Two Rivers meeting

Then we get to the bus and he shouted and screamed at us all the way about how we were late and we must do things like that on our own time! We were both shocked and absolutely gob-smacked. (I just asked Dion why we didn’t say something – he says it’s because it was so unexpected and we couldn’t believe it). That guy could learn a thing or two about hospitality from the Thai people.

On the bus, he publicly berates us again but like this…you don’t go off and do your own thing blah blah blah. Then and this is the best bit – he says we can be dropped off either at our hotel or somewhere along the way. So he goes up the aisles asking each couple where they want to be dropped off and when he gets to us, he ignores us totally and moves onto the next couple. Amazing! So childish and unprofessional. You can believe that if I’d been in Jhb, I would have given him a piece of my mind. Being half way around the world in a not-very-friendly city I just shut up counting down the minutes till we were off that bus and away from Mr Congeniality. Fortunately after about 10 minutes we were dropped off outside the Petronas Towers shopping centre, or Suria, the proper name


Detour into the weirdness of people
It’s sort of unspoken but when you’re on a tour, you sit in the same seat throughout. You adjust the airflow to your liking, fix the curtains on the windows and so on. Well, there was a certain couple who didn’t care about tour bus etiquette. We were sitting in the 3rd or 4th seats from the front. We got off at the first stop and got back on only to find that our seats had been taken. Fine, I thought, two can play at this game. So next time we left the bus, I made sure they were off first before us and I put my top and water bottle on our seats. Well, that worked – when they came back, they went to other seats and we had our original seats again.

However, they again took other people’s seats. And I heard the one lady mutter something, so when we stopped before we got off, I said to her, “they did the same thing to us. Put something on your seats – should keep them for you”. She had some stuff from the shop so she left her parcel and that seemed to do the trick.

I suppose I’m a bit of a saddo because I felt really vindicated by this J

some architechture in KL...

This was probably the worst city tour we’d ever been on, due to the tour guide’s abysmal behaviour and the fact that I felt cheated since they rushed us at some of the most stunning places and yet we could easily have spent an extra 10 minutes here and there if the tour itself was the 3 hours they said it was.