City Living in Kuala Lumpur

One month in Indonesia flew by too fast, and suddenly Travel Bro Ally and I were on to Country #3: Malaysia.

Kuala Lumpur was majorly different from the tiny backpacker towns we’d been lounging around in Northern Sumatra for over a week. Suddenly we were in a major metropolitan city: modern, bright, fast, wealthy, frenetic, and oh so fun!

Between cocktails at various sky bars, grazing the huge variety of ridiculously delicious food, exploring the biggest shopping malls I’ve ever seen, and taking in the museums and history, we ended up spending more time in KL than we have anywhere else (a whole week!).

KL Tower

One of the Petronas Towers

Cool swirly lights building
Bukit Bintang district – like a mini Bourbon St or Fremont St

Aside from all these neon lights, there is some amazing culture just outside the city and easily accessible on the train.

The Batu Caves are a series of, well, caves, many of which feature Hindu shrines and altars. This cave features the world’s tallest statue of Hindu deity Lord Murugan; it’s also the only cave that’s free to enter so it’s by far the most popular!

On the way up the steps behind Lord Murugan to enter the cave and see the other shrines, there’s a path leading into a smaller cave called simply Dark Cave. For a fee, you can take a guided tour of this important conservation site. The cave is filled with cave bats, cave crickets, cave snakes, cave spiders… okay you get the point, all the creatures that live in this cave are uniquely adapted to cave environments! Many of the species are incredibly rare and only exist in this cave and one or two others nearby.

Beautiful stalagmites and stalactites in Dark Cave.

Dark Cave is very aptly named and you’re guided by flashlight only through the huge cathedral caverns. At one point our guide had us all turn our lights off to experience the environment the cave critters call home, and it was oppressively dark and creepy in there.

The Batu Caves area feels so entirely different from Kuala Lumpur that it’s hard to believe that it’s just about a thirty minute train ride from the city center. You can be there and back well in time for happy hour — which reminds me, I have a bone to pick with the US. In Southeast Asia, happy hour is frequently from a respectable 5pm-9pm, or all day before 10pm, or from 3pm-9pm, or from 4pm-10pm, or some other combination of multiple hours. Not a very silly, impractical 4pm-6pm that’s impossible to make because of traffic and work schedules and trying to squeeze in a workout at the gym or needing to pick up your drycleaning before that closes at 6 or getting stuck in a long line at Trader Joe’s or… you get my frustration, yes?

Get on it, America. Happy hours. Many of them. It’s a much better system.