Kuala Lumpur>Perlis>Pantai Cenang Beach
08.01.2013 - 18.01.2013 40 °C
Well we made it to SE Asia and we love it already :D We took a long sleepless flight from Istanbul to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital city 10 days ago. We got into KL at about 8 am but we crossed 6 time zones so to us it still felt like 2 am. We tried our best to stay awake through the day but only made it to about 3 in the afternoon and it took us a full 6 days before we actually slept through the night again! Man did I ever underestimate jet lag! So our first few days in KL we walked around like zombies but still enjoyed our time there. We stayed in the heart of Chinatown and it was just as crazy, busy, smelly and exciting as I hoped it would be :D We were only catching sleep here and there through the day so we were out and about more at night the first few days, and ate some great street food ( theres an AMAZING mix of Indian, Chinese and Malay food here) and on the second night we headed to the famous Petronas towers!
They are pretty impressive! Downtown KL is beautiful lots of trees and tropical plants mixed in with modern towering skyscrapers and its a super clean city. Right in front of the towers is a huge park with a fountain show that goes off every hour or so and at night is all light up with tons of people just sitting around the park taking in the views. The next day we we made an attempt to go to another huge public park not too far from Chinatown but made the mistake of not really scoping out where the entrance was - it was so big that we thought well we'll just run into it , we did but we weren't really picturing the park to be like a rainforest right in the middle of the city , you can't just enter wherever you want haha so we actually just ended up walking the entire perimeter of it and by the time we got near the entrance we both had blisters on our feet and it was closed haha. It was still a really nice walk regardless but we might have to try again when we head back there in a few days I just have one picture and one of a mosque that was also in the park just as the sun was starting to go down.
On our way back to Chinatown we walked by the Sultan Abdul Samad building which houses the Ministry of Commucations and Culture of Malaysia, it also puts on a pretty cool light show at night as it completely changes colors from red, purple, green, yellow and blue every couple seconds.
Once we started to get back on track we went for green tea and Dim Sum in the mornings. For those of you that don't know what Dim Sum is -its pretty much Jordan and I's favorite type of meal. It's all different kinds of Chinese dishes, fish dumplings, pork dumplings , sweet and sour pork buns, coconut balls, deep fried shrimp, egg rolls etc that is served on carts and you just pick and choose what you want when they come around. We found a great place and hit it at least 3 or 4 times before we left Mmm its making me hungry just thinking about it. We spent the rest of our time in KL shopping in Chinatown, and just walking around taking in all the sights. We made it back to the towers on our last day and spent almost the whole day in the park there. I also found a place in the Central Market that had a Fish Foot Spa! They are quite common here and are super cheap I paid $1.64 for 15 min. It's a tank full of Doctor fish that you put your feet into and they swarm around and eat all the dead skin off your feet! Jordan didn't want to do it because he had a big open blister on the back of his foot ( I don't blame him ) so I toughed it out first! It doesn't hurt at all but it tickles SO bad ! It's extremely hard to keep still by the time my 15 minutes was up I was just starting to relax and enjoy it
After 5 days in the hot and humid city we were ready to hit a beach so we took a night bus from KL to Perlis a town on the northern coast of Malaysia right on the Thailand border and took a ferry to Lankawi Island there we rented a scooter and loaded it up with all of our bags like the locals do haha and headed 25kms down the road to Pantai Cenang beach.
Lankawi is a very small island and we easily covered all of its highways in our 6 days here. The whole island is duty free which makes some things like beer extremely cheap! The cheap beers were .46 cents each and premium beer like Hogaarden and Coronas were .61 cents. So we pretty much spent all,of our days here the same, morning coffee at McDonalds (it's the only place we can find that serves real coffee and not Nescafé, and they have free refills!) a couple of hours on the beach because that's pretty much all you can handle its SO bloody hot +43 some days, a scooter ride in the afternoon to see as much as we could and an evening of cheap beers!! You jealous yet? Haha! The food on the main strip is actually expensive for Malaysia but we found a few markets that are open only once a week and some food stalls far out by the airport that are crowded with locals to find some great cheap food! Tonight for example we bought a big dish of spicy noodles, two peanut pancakes, two pieces of BBQ'd chicken, two samosas one chicken burger and a drink ( what? We were hungry ok? Haha ) all for $3.45 ! Now you see also why we eat so much! I can't believe how much of a difference there is between eating at the restaurants and eating in local areas from food stalls! And plus its 10x better food !
We encountered some great sights on our scooter road trips including locals carrying infants on scooters -crazy! A couple beautiful sunsets a black sand beach, and some wild monkeys doing some pretty interesting things haha. The scooter was a great investment it was easily the best way to see the island and eating no where near where we were staying pretty much paid for the scooter itself Tomorrow we are heading back to mainland and heading to the Cameron Highlands (we think) - a mountainous region covered in tea plantations for a few days before heading back to KL to fly over to the Borneo side of Malaysia. Here's a few pics of Langkawi! Enjoy
Please feel free to enter your own caption below for the following picture ! Hahaha