Our journal

Sunday 5th of May 2019

Getting to the hotel was not a problem at all . Since it is located directly at the airport . Checking in when smoothly because I had already made a booking the next 7 nights. After I was given my door-key, and said thank you, they respond with “Sama Sama” ? Odd, I thought that was the name of the hotel. Well in fact “Sama Sama” is used to say “you´re welcome” :-).
My room is on the eighth floor end of course rights at the end of the passage. From my room I can see the airport building and hear and watch planes arriving and departing.

I unpacked my clothing for the next 6 days and then decided to go and discover where breakfast would be served and how to get to the pool. As you noticed I phoned all of you except Philip because he was jogging at the time.
Since I didn’t get much sleep during the flight to Kuala Lumpur I decided to go to bed booty for getting that there are 6 hours ahead which of course what is nonsense because it was already midnight. . I set the alarm clock wake me up at 8 o’clock and fell asleep quickly.
When the alarm went off I thought I would snooze a while but seem to have switched the alarm off completely and ended up lying in bed until 10 local time.
I got dressed quickly and went down to the lobby, to the restaurant called “Degrees” which is where breakfast was served until 11:00 am, giving me approximately one hour. Enough time to enjoy 3 double espressos :-).

I was thrilled to see some Indian dishes available – so it´s curry for breakfast for the next 7 days – mmmmmmh lekker

On my way back to the room, I dropped off at the concierge´s desk and enquired about seeing the city. He suggested I take the train which takes me directly to the city centre. I just had to go back to the airport building and then follow the signs to.
That was indeed easy. Bought a return ticket at the machine and headed off to the train´s departure hall. This express train actually comes from the city´s  new terminal call KLIA2 and then rushes at speeds of up to 140km/h to the city centre. That was a very impressive already. Arriving at the KL Sentral – as it´s called here, I popped into the tourist information office and they gave me a map with a couple of suggestions, ie. old KL and then of course the Petronas towers.
So I set off and on my walk. I ended up going into the adjacent mall and couldn’t really find the exit. Backtracked to the terminal hall and discovered an exit next to the escalator access to the mall. Went outside and saw a “Hop-On-Hop-Off” bus drive past. Well I did have that in mind initially and that would have been a good idea, if I had gotten out of bed a little earlier.
Then I used my downloaded Google map of KL and discovered that it would have been a 3 km walk, so I decided to go back to the tourist office. They told me where the Hop-Bus leaves and that one circuit would take approx. 3 hours. So as I had thought – all a bit late for that.
So I decided to use the public transport to get to one of the stations near the old part of town. Walked up and down many escalators and then finally reached the ticket machine.
Well I was hoping not to have to draw any money as I didn´t really have to do that in the Philippines and Indonesia on my last trip. Well, as you can guess, I had to go and draw some cash and that meant going back up and down all the escalators to find an ATM. I ended up using an ATM that I had passed on my way to the tourist office 😀
Then all the way back. At the ticket machine I chose my destination only to find out that it was out of change and I would have to use smaller notes which the ATM didn’t give me. Fortunately there was a ticket office on the other side of the hall. I asked for a ticket to my destination of choice, but the dude wasn´t really interested and said he would give me some smaller notes so that I could get my “token” at the machine.
Did that, got the token, placed the token on the token reader and I was allowed to pass through and finally take the next underground to “Merdeka”.
I took one of the exits without really knowing whether it was right or wrong. As soon as I was outside, I used google maps to find out in which direction to head and started walking. It didn´t really look anything like an old part of the town. After about a 800m I reached China Town and this is my first pic – A Chinese Tee shop

Since it was late afternoon already and being at the equator, dusk is quick to come and go. So I wondered around looking for the train station that was to take me up further north of the city. Somehow I couldn´t find it because the station that I passed used a different colour for the route than the map I had received. Instead of looking for the stops which were listed nicely, I was checking colours. Anyways I ended up going back to the station I had passed already. It took a while to click, I think this time I can definitely blame jet lag ! 🙂

Took the train to a stop called KLCC which took me to some interesting buildings

I walked into the ground floor entrance and ended up in a huge posh shopping mall with all the fancy outlets you can think of…

By now I new my way around and how to use the public transport and decided to head back to the hotel. That all went smoothly . Altogether it was a super day!