Kuala Lumpur
I awoke to a stationary bus. I checked my watch. It was still 3am and by my knowledge I wasn’t due in Kuala Lumpur until four or five. I asked the Indian and the Pakistani, who told me this was my stop. Of course, the time difference, four o’clock Malay time is three Thai. I left the bus into a dark city that glowed orange from sulphur lights. I was still waking up and searching only for a way to Sentral Station, but I remember the space we were in being small, surrounded on all sides by tall buildings of ten or eleven floors, and beyond that the skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur. A raised road or train way ran past, twisting out from between two buildings and following another road off on a bend.
I bartered with a taxi driver who was claiming ‘midnight charges’ and a RM25 fare for a five kilometre journey. I knew it was preposterous and suggested fifteen, but he only budged to twenty. With all lights out and no other options, I took his rip-off and spent no more than two minutes in his cab before we were at Sentral Station.
It was deserted. More than that, not a single light was on in the main foyer area. The automatic door opened and I walked past ominous shapes covered with a tossed cloth. Two Malays lounged in plump massage chairs. They were deep in shadow. I moved away…
Grasping on to hope from the first sign I saw, I took an escalator down to an empty platform. No train was due and the screens showed nothing but darkness. From the main foyer again, I found another way down, taking me to an area lined with shuttered shops. A few stalls lay dormant in the centre, like antique furniture protected from gathering dust in an attic with a protective cloth draped over.
I passed a dim tunnel leading down to more platforms. The screeching and clattering of a train coming in followed by the two-tone signal for opening doors echoed up into the space. With my luggage stowed in a locker, I found a 24-jam (24-hour) McDonalds with free wifi and headed in. A few other silent customers sat with a coffee, or tray of hash browns and egg. I was distracted, emailing home and writing for almost an hour and a half, and when I looked up again, the place swarmed with new people.
The lights had come on throughout the station and people thronged past attendants and shopkeepers as they began to unfurl the blankets and rattle away shutters. I got up and headed for the exit, immediately stumped. A road passed in front of the main entrance of the station flowing one way and curling away out of sight at each end. Opposite the entrance rose a shiny blue-windowed office block on stilts above a smoggy car park.
There were no signs except to point out the obvious taxi stand where a row of taxi cars stood next to a bundle of taxi drivers waiting to pounce on anyone brave or stupid enough to pass them. I asked a policeman where to find the sky train.
“Skytren? Oh no, we not have skytren. Have skybas?”
“OK, sky bus then.”
“OK you go back and down some stairs OK? Then you go to the end and at the end OK? You go down again for skybas.”
He smiled. I doubted him. Going down twice to find a sky bus? Still, I had nowhere else to go. Back through the station, I emerged down underneath a flyover, or a building, I couldn’t tell. The covered road was lit yellow and stank of fumes and dust. A red Air Asia shuttle bus stood at the bottom of the escalator: sky bus. Of the stream of people crammed onto the escalator with me, only a handful stepped onto the bus, the rest moved along the road on foot. I followed. Sure enough, we crossed the road and entered a little tunnel signposted to the Monorail station. It snaked through a construction site, emerging at a crossroads where further signs led past a row of dingy shops and under another concrete flyover, though this one was for the Monorail. I figured out where I wanted to go and bought a little plastic token. Another man passed through the barriers by pressing his plastic token onto a patch on the gate. I followed suit and as if by magic the plastic token opened the gate for me.
The Monorail Tren drew in to the station, wobbling on its tight-rope of concrete. Soon after it pulled out again, we rounded a corner and the track tilted to what felt like thirty or forty degrees, though it was more like five or ten. What is it with these South-East Asians and tilting everything on the corners like a Scalectrics racetrack? I had seen it so much in Thailand on all the expressways and now for this monorail, a slow coach—at least, too slow to warrant a tilt. We passed exotic place names: Tun Sambanthan, Maharajaley, Imbi, Raja Tulan. The Tren swept through the city and I saw glimpses of some streets glinting with the metal roofs of cars in traffic, down others you see green and red tarp tops of market stalls and street vendors. Just before reaching Bukit Nanas we passed a hill of green trees and grass. At the top, the Kuala Lumpur tower speared the sky where buildings nearby merely scratched and scraped.
I hopped down to street level and headed for the Patronas Twin Towers. Completed in 1997, they are now the world’s tallest twin towers. At four-hundred and thirty-four metres they have eighty-six floors and, the showpiece of it all, a sky-bridge connecting the twins one-hundred and seventy metres above street level. From Bukit Nanas, a road leads to the base of the twins. Around halfway along it, they peek into view, glistening in the morning sunlight and glowing bluer than the sky. They appear at first to be not much taller than the other offices and banks around them, but as all obstructions peel away and you come to just a road’s width from their base, you can appreciate their grandeur more justly. They still shine as if new and look fake; Photo-shopped and edited into the picture of Kuala Lumpur. I made a crow-line for the entrance at the base of one of the towers. Just inside the tall glass doors, I could feel the weight of the tower above me: my body felt heavy and my legs weakened. I walked it off, exploring a four-floor shopping mall installed between the twins. It was sleeping and its only patrons at this hour were powering through on a shortcut, bee lining for their offices above.
What I was really looking for was the sky-bridge tour. From the outside, I had been following another tourist from Eastern Europe. He had powered ahead of his wife at a double pace, steaming into the Patronas Towers. I had entered after him but lost track and found instead the mall. I asked a security guard about the sky-bridge tour and he directed me to the right place. I took an escalator down a shiny narrow corridor lined on both sides with polished metal. The basement below tower 1 was pristine, polished cream stone, walls floor, and ceiling. Set into the wall, glass cabinets held crystal sculptures and laser-etched models of the Twins next to gold-leafed crockery bearing pictures of the famous building. A queue formed, leading a short distance around a corner to where I presumed the ticket counters lay. It was coming on to nine o’clock and I hoped to catch the nine-thirty tour. Creeping forward in the queue, I saw around the corner to a snaking line doubling back on itself six times before reaching the counters. Disheartened but determined to make the visit, I stuck around and watched a short documentary about the construction of the Twins four or five times. “The largest single concrete foundation project…” “Foundations stretching one-hundred and fifty metres into the ground…” “Such and such tonnes of metal used in the skeleton…” “A twenty metre pinnacle to top it off…” “Engineering feat never before…” It was an hour before I left the basement, ticket in hand, and emerged from the cool air-conditioned building into the still heat of Kuala Lumpur in mid-summer.
On the way to the Twins, I had passed a tourist information centre and to this I now headed, eager to explore some more of this city before my one o’clock tour of the sky-bridge. The building had a lavish garden out the front with brick-paved pathways leading in grids through trellises covered in creepers and vines. Lining the walkways, huge pots held small Aloe plants and bundles of low-growing flowers. Inside the stone arched entrance, a tiered fountain stood dormant, the cherub atop it frozen with no steady stream of water.
The doors to the building were tinted black, making the place seem closed, but as I went to peer through the glass, the automatic doors slid past me and the cool breeze flowing out invited me in. The space inside had a few people milling around; one sat reading leaflets on a couch, another using an internet booth further in. I grabbed a few leaflets and wandered around. Most of the leaflets advertised theme parks and children’s Museums running daily tours of the animated dinosaur figures. I had heard of a hop-on hop-off bus tour that takes you around the city and enquired about that.
A ticket for the bus cost me RM18 and took me—and a few others scattered across the top deck of the bus—on a slow journey around a few of the attractions, starting with the Kuala Lumpur tower at the top of its green-coated hill. We made slow progress, passing an old non-descript building that housed, according to the commentary, the national radio and telegraph museum, boasting an old radio set from the first World War. Our next stop sat us on a street packed with shopping centres and malls, stretching up and away from their double entrances. Signs advertised a plethora of eateries, electronics shops, designer clothing, gadgetry and gizmos, souvenirs, and sweet stalls.
We passed the City Walk, a stretch of pedestrian-only real estate sandwiched in the middle of a block of high-risers. The entrance was lavish, an elaborate archway with a large screen showing off some of the possibilities held within. The commentary announced yet another shopping centre to our right; only the highest value brands, the crème de la crème. The perfect models of Armani, Gucci, Ravioli, Gnochi and countless other designer clothing names posed and strutted across the glass walls of the building. Just around the corner and we were in China Town, the narrow streets cracking off our road twisted away amidst traditional awnings below oriental roofs.
My stop was central market. There is a river bordering the market complex, reduced to a stream scraping the bottom of a vast canal during summer. The walls of the waterway are adorned with elaborate graffiti; some colourful, jagged designs of a tag or name, others depicting whole scenes from comic books. The bold colours brightened the insipid concrete but did little to improve the rancid water swirling between stagnant pools in the bed.
Central Market had emerged hundreds of years ago as a bustling fish market lining the life-blood of Kuala Lumpur. As the capital expanded, the market grew and the produce varied from fish to other groceries and meat, before converting itself to a craft market and now a tourist’s souvenir stop. Some time ago, the city council had constructed a covering for the market, enclosing it in a large building that had plenty of shop spaces as well as room for stalls in the pedestrian walkways.
I passed shops stacked with useless trinkets, Patronas key-rings, mug-mats, statuettes, fridge magnets, shot glasses, paper weights, wall hangings and post cards lined the walls and shelves of one shop whilst another next door stocked a vast array of crystal sculptures and wooden statues. Shirts and sloganned tees hung in reams from a stall outside a soap and tea shop specialising in herbal remedies. Puter sculptures, a Malay speciality, lined the windows of one shop and had me gazing longingly at the intricate and delicate figures; beautiful birds caught mid-flight, fish leaping from the sea in a splash of metal, a big cat leaping for its prey. I passed a Chinese shop, its windows stacked with porcelain cats with wagging paws, dragon teapots, and red paper lanterns. Inside was mottled rich red and sparkling gold. Lanterns hung from the ceiling and elaborate tea sets were stacked high on benches and shelves.
In the main atrium, I was caught by a scarf seller and reeled in to browse her wares. She badgered me to purchase one or two, showing me all the different patterns and colours, showing the highest quality, and most expensive ones, as well as the cheaper, plainer ones. I stood back a step, trying to decide which to buy. Hoping to get a discount for two scarfs, I picked out two of the cheaper options. Normally at RM69 for two (about £14) I bartered for RM50. The lady was not happy, but some cajoling and persuasion helped her accept my offer.
Out the back of this indoor market space, I came across an art-deco inspired art gallery. Venturing up old plaster steps, I walked along a balcony lined with small art shops. The ‘galleries’ were more like stores of paintings and drawings by a variety of artists ranging in style from Chinese Pop Art to expressionistic experimentations to mixed media pieces. Canvases and frames crowded the walls and leaned in stacks against tables lain with art magazines and brochures. The proprietor sat at a laptop, working on a small easel to her side with charcoal pencil. She drew a friend’s face and worked briskly with the charcoal, scratching and shading with excellent observation. All the paintings were for sale, though well beyond my price range, so I settled for a magazine and took a few shots of my favourite pieces.
Back on the street, I wanted to find one of the old-style moor-ish buildings I had seen from the monorail and the bus. A short distance away, I saw a sign for a textile museum and decided to take a detour. Inside were beautiful examples of cloths and wall hangings ranging from loomed and woven fabrics to batik artwork. The building’s pale pink and cream brickwork allowed for simple patterns across the façade. The doorways and windows carefully arched, round turrets shooting out of the corners. The museum joined on to a government building with two larger cylindrical towers. A spiral staircase inside meant for a spiralling pattern of windows and brickwork on the outside, making the towers look like brick candy-canes. Across the road, a green lawn fronted an old Tudor-style building with dark wooden beams showing through the whitewashed walls.
It was nearing one o’clock and I needed to head back to the Petronas Towers for my tour. I had lost my bearings and could not see the Twins for directions. Following a monorail line, I arrived at a station and found the route to a stop near their base. Initially I boarded the wrong line, having to head back to the station and take a different line towards the KLCC. This one was an underground train with no driver. The back window looked out into the tunnel lined with lights, giving the feel of a sci-fi film; speeding down a futuristic transport system or a wormhole in space.
Rushing down into the basement area of the Patronas towers, I had just enough time to buy a Sky Lunch ticket before heading over to the meeting area. We gathered in front of a pillar out of which a sheet of smoke peeled away, remaining flat for almost a metre before swirling into the air. A projector shone a short film onto the smoke, appearing like a hologram and amusing the kids—and adults—as they put their hand through the shimmering image.
The twenty people in my tour group shuffled into an elevator and the guide told us we would soon be at the eighty-second floor. Within half a minute the lift was slowing to a halt for us to alight. We must have been rocketing up through the floors and I remember hearing the beeps of floors passing by going off more than twice a second. Outside the elevator, a dark, glass-panelled corridor ran past. A blue glow emanated from the floor and picked out white outlines of other tall buildings from around the world, put in perspective next to the Patronas Towers. From the eighty-second floor, we had a smaller lift to carry us up to the viewing deck on the eighty-fourth. The large room spread across the entire eighty-fourth floor, giving access to the windows lining the outside of the building and a 360-degree view over the sprawl of Kuala Lumpur and into the hills beyond.
I had been in tall buildings before and knew of the illusion of miniaturised cars on the streets below, but never had I seen the skyscrapers around also reduced to toys. The twins seemed to stretch twice as high as any surrounding buildings. Far below, behind the twin goliaths, a lush park spreads from the base, networked by paths and dotted with pools and fountain shows. Nearby, the thread of the national highway extends through the city, reaching over the suburbs and twisting into the haze beyond. Nearer to the city, the expressway split and spaghettified in a knot of laybys, let-offs and on-ramps.
To one side of the tower, a district of low houses nestled in a small dip, lining the motorway. The roofs were collared rust red or shining silver. Lining this poorer area, apartment blocks stood like a palisade, guard towers watching over the slums, and led in to the high-rise centre. Atop some of the luxurious hotel blocks, opal pools glistened in the midday sun. We had twenty minutes at the top and I spent the time running from window to window, daring myself to look down to the miniature metropolis below.
The guide shepherded us back to the lift and we dropped to the forty-somethingth floor for the sky-bridge. Stretching between these two towering beasts, the one-hundred metre long sky-bridge has two storeys and weighs some ridiculous amount of tonnes.
After another allotted twenty minutes, the tour guide directed me around the corner, through an empty floor, to a small room with a display cabinet of food. This was the sky-lunch, and three waiters stood ready and awaiting my order. I had a choice of a few small sandwiches, battered deep fried crab, spring rolls, and a light salad. I ate looking over the sparkling obelisks of Kuala Lumpur’s skyline as they diminish in the distance into haze and hills.
Back on the ground floor, I headed into the now busy shopping centre wedged between the towers. The five floors held a range of clothing stores, sports shops, watch and jewellery outlets, and a food mall offering western comforts the likes of KFC, McDonalds and Starbucks.
I took a seat but soon found myself nodding off, so I decided to venture out to the National Visual Arts Palace, sufficiently far enough away and promising a range of modern and traditional art ranging from sculpture and handicraft to photography and painting. The adventure first took me back to Bukit Nanas, where I caught the monorail to the end of the line at Titiwangsa. From there I assumed it would be a quick walk around the corner to the Arts Palace. A four-lane highway runs away from the station, splitting around a raised ramp that takes half of the traffic on a sweeping curve following the monorail line. The pedestrian footway on my side of the road disappears into a grassy verge as the road dips down under a network of interchanges and overpasses. I found a path heading out of the confusing dip and now followed a four-lane boulevard rife with traffic.
Across the road, I saw the Arts Palace approach and pass, unable to make my way to the other side through the stream of traffic. Crossing at this point would have been like playing Frogger. I was never very good at that game. Signs pointed to a pedestrian overpass one hundred metres beyond the Arts Palace and Cultural Centre. Stepping up out of the traffic and able to look over the trees lining the boulevard, I saw a game of football in play. The sun low, but still hot, I couldn’t imagine playing such an active game in this temperature. Across the flat green, apartment blocks marked the beginning of central Kuala Lumpur. Beyond these marshals, indicators of Big City, the upside-down skiing pole of the KL Tower and the Petronas Twins stood like icons amidst the huddle of office blocks.
Below me, the cars flashed reflections of the sun into my eyes. I descended on the other side and headed into the nearest building. An escalator took me up past a decorative mural in flashy colours and angular shapes, the faces of key persons involved in the Arts Palace submerged in graffiti-like paintings and designs. Inside was empty of visitors and the receptionist directed me through to the central theatre area, a cylindrical space with a spiralling ramp leading up to the levels above. From here, the galleries led off left and right.
There were a few exhibits on and I first explored a collection of cartoons. A few likened themselves to cartoons often found in newspapers, depicting what I can only assume to be political messages through jokes and sarcasm. Another piece showed a conglomerate of Malay caricatures, heads too big for their bodies, showing either a group of politicians or a football team—I couldn’t be sure.
On the same floor, a series of 49 paintings by Ismail Embong portraying and celebrating the history of the Malacca Malay Sultanate Empire of the 15th century. The paintings line the walls of a large room and after walking past a few of the paintings, dominated by tens of characters at war with each other or in the middle of a heated court debate or on a warring march through Malaysia, I was distracted by the lights of the room. Dotted across the ceiling, the lights reflected perfectly in the high polish of the mock-marble lino floor, like walking across the still surface of a crystal pool.
I moved on to a photographic exhibition which had a room set up like a darkroom with a documentary video showing some of the techniques used by the artist. I watched for a while before the lights and video shut off. A security guard came in to let me know that I had quarter of an hour before the gallery closed. Another exhibit showed off the works of a famous Indian poet, who also dabbled in drawing and painting. Outside the showroom, a large plaque had extracts from one of his lectures about the artistic-political revolution, and his father’s and his own involvement in it. His works explored expression, and were mainly abstract forms and figures—humans and animals—as well as a few scenic landscapes and purely patterned pieces.
With my troubles crossing the road earlier in mind, I stayed on the same side of the road, hoping to follow it back to the station. I reached the intersection of monorail, boulevard and raised expressway and again became lost in the birds’ nest of pedestrian overpasses, underpasses and footways. After several wrong turns, I popped out onto the road again with Titiwangsa station in sight.
I returned to City Walk for dinner, intrigued by my passing that morning. The pedestrian-only walkway led down the centre of a block of high-rise office blocks. Amidst blue windowed buildings and shrouded in long shadows from the sinking sun, a few small restaurants, bars and souvenir shops snuggled into place. Hidden from the traffic and spared from the sweltering sun, the City Walk became a pleasant stroll. On my right, stone benches lay interspersed with rockeries and plant-beds, with a few water features adding a peaceful trickle of water to the environment. To the left, the one and two-story shops were quiet and mostly empty. Some were already shutting up for the night whilst the restaurants still served out dishes ranging from Chinese influence through to western dishes and more traditional Malay options.
After passing through to the busy streets and monorail line at the other end, I escaped back between skyscrapers and chose a restaurant with wooden décor and no English language menu. Ordering my food from pictures at the counter, I chose Nasi Goreng Cina and an Iced Tea. No sooner had I paid for my food than I turned to find a waiter already holding my meal and asking me where I wanted to sit. Taken off guard, I took the plates and sat nearby. The food, however quickly it came, was good, and very cheap.
I came back to the busy street and figured I would need to cross it at some point so I went up some steps into a pedestrian walk way suspended several metres above the road. The glass walled structure had air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, and headed down the street further than I had expected, following the road for several blocks, with connections across to buildings and malls nearby. A British couple had asked directions from an American working in Kuala Lumpur, who took them down the walkway towards a monorail station. The pedestrian ‘highway’ had only been completed three months ago and connected some of the major shopping centres around central Kuala Lumpur. We passed an intersection where the AC pathway split in two, following both roads. This kind of innovation, raising the pedestrians from the street into a cool tunnel, is the sort of thing that makes it clear South-East Asian cities and countries will soon, if not already, pass the rest of us by as more efficient, worker-friendly cities.
The train back to Kuala Lumpur Sentral was packed to overflowing with business men and women clutching Kindles, iPads and briefcases. Although I was one of the only backpacking travellers on the train, I was not the only foreigner. Malaysia has a large population of Indian immigrants as well as a Chinese influence and plenty of settled Westerners; international business people and entrepreneurs.
Now in darkness, the Petronas Twins sparkled like generously adorned Christmas trees in the distance, spotlights and window lights shining brighter and taller than its surrounding competitors. From the monorail station, I passed through the amber glow of the sky-bus terminal underneath Kuala Lumpur Sentral station and found the vendors and souvenir stalls beginning to pack up their things. The station, though crowded at rush hour for now, would soon return to how it had been when I first saw it fifteen hours ago; a desolate, darkened place void of commotion. Right now, people streamed in all directions, urgent and purposeful in their strides and making little leeway for me as I tried to figure out where to head to.
Train twenty-five to Woodlands, Singapore. The announcement came quiet over the PA and I headed for the platform. At four in the morning, I had ventured down to the same platform where my train now waited. There had been no giveaway to its destination or service line at the time. I boarded my coach; two rows of double-decker berths, forty to a carriage. They were small and simple, army-like in appearance. I found my bunk, but no place to fit Colossus. After attempting to lay on the three-foot wide berth whilst hugging my luggage, I followed suit of the others wandering onto the train and left it in the aisle. As the train shifted into motion, many passengers sat on the edge of their bunk, looking lost and tired. It was as if no one knew what they were supposed to be doing. The atmosphere was subdued and silent. I headed for the toilet to brush my teeth and ready for bed.
In the compartment between carriages, one of the exit doors had not locking mechanism and swung on its hinges with the swaying of the train. Lights flashed past beyond and a breeze strayed into the dingy gangway. The toilet room was in a state with yellowing walls and puddles on the floor. The sink drained onto the floor too, missing altogether a second drain in the corner of the floor below.
I sat on my berth, exhausted, waiting for the crying baby below to fall asleep. Though I was a foot too long for the bunk, I was glad to be lying horizontal and soon fell asleep myself.