We had just a one day stopover in Kuala Lumpur on our way from Indonesia to Thailand, but we made the most of it. We had booked two tours on the With Locals site — a morning sightseeing tour and an afternoon street food tour.
Our airbnb this time was a modern apartment on the 33rd floor of a high rise condo/hotel with valet parking and front desk service. It also had an amazing view over the city.
There was a nearby mall where we got everything we needed for a satisfying breakfast the next morning before we were picked up by Adnan, our With Locals tour guide for the morning.
Our first stop was the Batu Caves, which are much more than caves. They are enormous caverns that have been turned into a Hindu shrine. Our timing was fortunate. Adnan said that the day before had been an important Hindu festival and the place had been crammed with 800,000 people from all over Malaysia for the ceremony. There were no tours there that day.
Due to the festival, we got to see the place at its most colorful as there had been major restoration going on prior to the big day. The decorations and paintings on the buildings were incredibly detailed.
Although the place is a shrine, it is also a commercialized tourist spot. The plaza below the caves has cafes and souvenir shops and there are plenty of non-Hindus mixed in with the Hindu devotees. I did have to rent a sarong to wrap around my legs to cover my knees before climbing the 272 rainbow colored stairs up to the caves. You can see the steps ascending into darkness behind us in the photo below.
I made it all the way to the top with several rests along the way and got to see the inside. The first chamber is immense and has small shrines around the sides. From the floor of the first chamber more stairs ascend to the main temple in an area where the cave opens to the sky. David went up to take a look but I had had enough stairs by then.
On our way out we saw a guy who was still painting details on some peacocks that didn’t get finished before the festival. It looked like painstaking work.
On our way down the stairs we encountered quite a number of monkeys who hang around hoping for food. Mostly, there were appearing in tourist’s selfies.
After returning my sarong and a refreshing drink of coconut water straight from the coconut, we continued on to our next stop — the hot springs. This was a very local place where we felt very much like outsiders, but what tourist in their right mind would want to go to hot springs in such a hot country on a hot, humid day? Turns out these are hot springs like I have never experienced. Adnan explained that this is the local health spa where people come to cure their ailments and relieve their aches and pains. There were a variety of people soaking their feet, pouring water over their heads, and submerging in a number of different pools. Many were older folks like us, but there were also some younger people and some kids playing around. We didn’t take many photos because it felt intrusive.
Our guide led us to a circular pool about 20 feet in diameter that he said was the coolest one where you could swim and encouraged us to sit on the edge and dip our feet in the water. Well, holey moley! If that was the coolest pool, the others must have been close to the boiling point. This one was about 140F. We kept trying to put our feet right in the water but we never got past the soles of our feet for more than a few seconds.The kids seemed very amused.
Our guide sat beside us and submerged his feet saying that you have to put your mind elsewhere, think about other things, so I guess it is kind of a meditation by torture. We were absolutely stunned when a middle aged man actually got in the pool, slowly submerged, and swam underwater across and back twice before getting out. Unbelievable!!!! We were still working on getting our toes underwater. Adnan said that the hot water on my feet would help promote circulation and heal my knee — maybe he was right, my knee did gradually improve somewhat after that, or maybe it was just time doing its thing.
After perspiring profusely at the hot springs for a while, we were on to our third stop, the waterfalls. Again, there were many steps to climb to get to the waterfalls, but my knee had just had a health treatment so I made it to what Adnan referred to as the third level — he usually takes people to the seventh level, that must be a helluva climb. We could look down on people at the second level as we went by.
When we reached the third level, there was a lovely swimming pool created by a small dam where a number of young Muslim kids were swimming and diving from the rocks. If I had had some extra dry clothes with me, I would have dived right in myself. It looked so cool and refreshing. I did get my feet in this water though and wade around a bit in the stream below the dam.
Back down at the park, I was entertained by some playful baby monkeys while we waited for our guide to use the facilities.
On our way back into Kuala Lumpur, we saw some interesting geography which made me curious about what the rest of Malaysia is like. Maybe some day....
Our tour with Adnan was finished at 1:00 and we were meeting our next With Locals guide at 2:00 at a hotel to do a street food tour. We asked Adnan to drop us at the hotel and we would wait there. I was so hoping that there would be an air conditioned coffee shop nearby where I could sip on a latte while we waited. I thought about that all the way back and lo and behold, my wishes were granted. The hotel lobby itself had just the ticket. By the time Nadia arrived, we felt refreshed and ready for another adventure.
Nadia was a cheerful Muslim woman who delighted in taking us to taste Malaysian, Indian and Chinese cuisine - the same mixture of cultures as Singapore but a very different context.
All through SE Asia, we had been seeing durian, the king of fruit — stalls selling it by the side of the road, piles of them in trucks, posters forbidding them on subways and in hotels. We had asked some of our guides whether they liked to eat it and most said they loved it but we had heard that it has a very unusual taste, and a pervasive smell, that some people love and some hate. I had looked it up on the internet and watched a video of people tasting it for the first time — there were very mixed reactions. One description was that it was like mild garlic or onion got mixed with a bit of sugar and stirred into thick whipped cream. Difficult to imagine. I had been thinking that while we were there and it was in season, we really should try it, being self-professed foodies. So, here we were on a food tour with a local and we immediately pass a durian stall. It was fate. Nadia ordered us some.
The whole experience was a little like trying raw oysters for the first time — it’s a little frightening. All your senses are dealing with the unfamiliar texture and smell and flavor at the same time. It was creamy and it was a bit sweet and there was the savory background of mild garlic. For me, the combination was hard to reconcile and I don’t think I would pay a lot of money to eat it again by itself. It would be interesting to try making some kind of sauce with it though. David quite liked it and ate several pieces with gusto.
On the table you will also see bowls of an icy coconut milk broth with corn and some green noodly thing. It was delicious and very refreshing. Nadia then walked us through an older Malay part of town with low buildings that she said had been slated for demolition and redevelopment at one point, but “the people,” as she referred to them, said “NO” — they wanted a piece of the old lifestyle preserved. This was a Muslim area surrounding a mosque.
As we walked down the street, we realized that we could see our high rise condo straight ahead looming over the old village.
Eventually, we came to a row of street food stalls where Nadia ordered us some crispy fried bananas and vegetable fritters.
Then we went to a restaurant with a lot of monster fans in lieu of a/c where we got a package of coconut rice and boiled egg wrapped in a banana leaf with some spicy chicken in a sauce. It was fun to unwrap and delicious to eat.
Although we were already filling up, we still had Little India and Chinatown on our tour list. In Little India, Nadia took us to a very small, but air conditioned restaurant where we sampled two kinds of fried bread, some savory doughnuts, some curries and some chutneys. All delectable!!!
Nadia had planned our route well and took us on a little walk around some architecturally interesting older buildings so we could digest a bit before the final food stop. These were mostly empty buildings that used to house government offices. Again, they had been slated for demolition at one time but “the people” said “NO” so they were awaiting some refurbishing and repurposing of some sort. “The people” in Kuala Lumpur seem to be pretty feisty.
I have never been to Mecca, but Nadia said that this plaza was designed to be reminiscent of that holy Muslim place.
After some digestion time, we moved on to Chinatown. The Chinese New Year holiday meant that most of the usual food stalls would be closed, so Nadia took us to a nearby colorful market with a zillion things for sale.
Here, there was a Chinese place open and we had a noodle dish with an interesting fish sauce. It was a very slurpy dish to eat.
Then we walked through Chinatown and saw a lot of decorations for Chinese New Year.
Our final stop was at a street stall where there was a line up for a sweet coconut tofu soupy dessert thing. A most refreshing end to our food tour.
With full bellies, we said goodbye to Nadia and returned to our high rise apartment. Our window looked down over the very streets we had just been walking in the Malay village.
We were tired and didn’t need any dinner and my leg was aching a bit, so I took some painkillers and we hung around for the evening reading and doing puzzles. But we felt that, in one day, we had gotten a good “taste” (pun intended) of Kuala Lumpur.
In the morning, we decided we should at least check out the building’s infinity pool, advertised as the highest in the city, even though we didn’t feel like going for a swim before packing up for our departure. Sure enough, it is a pool with an incredible view. There were lots of people taking selfies in the water with the city in the background.
That afternoon we flew to Thailand.
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