Tag Archives: Kuala Lumpur

SE Asia

Already 20 videos so far from our SE Asia trip!

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GoPro has been our true companion throughout our adventures in SE Asia. And hopefully it will also be that for many years to come :). I really like making photos but there’s just so much more liveliness in videos and they really take you back to those great moments. There will definitely be some more clips of Bali and Tokyo but I decided to combine all I’ve made so far into one post so you could easily reach them :). Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the places we’ve been! Enjoy :)!

Bangkok

Chiang Mai

Phuket

Langkawi

Kuala Lumpur

Singapore

Jakarta

Bali

 

SE Asia

Kuala Lumpur and Singapore budget + what to do

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Kuala Lumpur

Once again – as usual all the costs are averages for 2 people per day. KL was naturally not so inexpensive as Langkawi but nevertheless a very affordable place to visit or live.

  • Groceries (different food items and all other similar things). I’d say that at least half of the times we cooked something on our own since we had a big kitchen to use. There are numerous grocery stores at KL but we mostly visited Giant due to good choice of items and great prices – 33,4 ringgit
  • Transport (in case of KL it contains only Uber for some rides in the city + transport from and to the airport)  – 14,8 ringgit
  • Eating out (also includes breakfast). As an average a meal costs about 10-12 ringgit but be on a lookout for great lunch offers from numerous food trucks for only about 5-6 ringgit – 27,5 ringgit. 
  • Entrance fees (KL Bird park, cinema, National museum etc.) – 15,3 ringgit. By far the most expensive was Bird park but it was also worth it
  • Shopping (different souvenirs) – 14,91 ringgit
  • Other (mobile internet, cash withdrawal fees, washing clothes, and other similar) – 0 ringgit :). Washing clothes was free and we already had enough internet and cash

Our accommodation was 1638 ringgit totaling our expenses at 3120 ringgit (about 647€) during our 13 day stay.

Our recommendations about what to do and see in KL in no particular order:

  • KL Forest Eco Park and Canopy walk
  • Visiting the numerous beautiful shopping malls of KL. You don’t have to buy anything.. but you could 🙂
  • Petronas Twin towers and KLCC park
  • Central Market and Chinatown
  • Merdeka square
  • KL Botanical and Orchid gardens
  • The Police museum
  • The National Museum of Malaysia
  • Batu caves
  • Heli lounge
  • KL Bird park

Singapore

Singapore is in a class of it’s own related to living costs and it also shows out from our expenses. Nevertheless you can still enjoy this magnificent city with reasonable budget

  • Groceries (different food items and all other similar things). Since we didn’t cook ourselves the expenses in this area were not big – 3,9 S$
  • Transport (in case of Singapore it contains Uber and bike rental fee)  – 12,8 S$
  • Eating out (also includes breakfast). You can get a meal for 5S$ or also 50S$. Up to you 🙂 – 27,3 S$
  • Entrance fees (in our case only National museum ) – 7,5 S$
  • Shopping (different souvenirs) – 3 S$
  • Other (mobile internet) – 8 S$. The cheapest data prepaid card I could find was 32 S$

Our accommodation in Singapore was 150 S$ which means it total we spent 400 S$ (about 250€) during our 3,5 day visit.

Regarding what to do in Singapore read my previous post 🙂

All the best!

Lauri

 

SE Asia

So how is Kuala Lumpur?

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  • KL is definitely a shopping heaven. You can find a huge amount of different shopping malls and stores in here. Basically when you’re walking in downtown KL you are leaving one shopping mall and then seconds later entering another one. And the shopping never stops, it doesn’t matter what time or day of the week it is.
  • The city is really beautiful and clean. Most of the towering buildings are built in great architecture form and are just magnificent to look at!
  • Although we haven’t used the public transport ourselves it is quite highly praised in here. Monorail and Metro are definitely faster than driving a car since there seem to be traffic jams almost 24/7.
  • As said before Uber is really inexpensive here but the app sometimes glitches since between these high buildings GPS sometimes doesn’t work properly.
  • Unfortunately smoking is quite popular in here and quite often you can find people smoking inside also.
  • I don’t understand it but in a lot of stores there are signs like sales assistant or employees wanted with a little note that “Ladies only”, “Women only” or something similar. Looks weird…
  • Downtown KL is full of business and financial areas and buildings. And in many of these buildings on the first floor there are sales galleries of companies like Ferrari, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini and so on…
  • There are many well-kept parks in here. Big honors to them for that!
  • In other places we’ve been so far it hasn’t stand out but here walking on the streets you really notice how short most of the local people are and especially men. At least I get a great overview of everything :). In addition the average shoe size for women seems to be 35 (noticed it while Anna was shopping for shoes today 😀 )
  • During the new year’s celebration and generally on the evenings you don’t see many people drinking and it seems that most of the drinking is being done by tourists. By the way compared to Langkawi and actually to Estonia also beer here is rather expensive. One small can costs about 7-8 ringgit (~1,5€)
  • KL is really international city. You can see people from all different races and numerous countries everywhere.
SE Asia

Heli Lounge, Batu caves, KL Bird park and Roti Booom

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Heli Lounge

There are plenty of options to get a view over the towering skyline of KL. Different viewing platforms, the TV tower, Petronas Twin towers and so on. The problem with them is that in order to get to the top you have to pay 50-100 ringgit admittance fee and from most of the places you can see only to one or two directions. But our host here recommended a place called Heli Lounge/Bar which is just a 5 minute walk from our accommodation. The idea is that from early morning until 6 PM it is used as a helicopter landing pad but after that it’s turned to a rooftop bar with 360 degree view of the city. A really great idea in my opinion :)! To get a good place or a place at all it’s wise to go there slightly before 6. In order to get to the top all you need to do is buy a drink from the bar. The drinks are around 30-40 ringgit and at least the Long Islands we had were spot on :)! After 9 PM as we heard there will be some entrance fee and dress code so the best time to visit is between 6-9 in the evening so you could get a glimpse of the sunset also. An awesome place to go and see KL from a different vantage point :)!

KL panorama

Batu caves

Located about 13km outside the city center but still rather engulfed by the vastness of KL Batu caves are located. This place is considered to be one of the most sacred Hindu shrines outside of India and I must admit a quite huge tourist attraction also. It’s a rather long climb up the stairs where the entrance awaits. In there you can find some temples, beautiful cave formations and a lot of clever monkeys climbing around everywhere. Currently some areas are under renovation but it has a little effect to the beauty and the majesty of the cave. Be sure to visit a smaller cave filled with different statues from Hindu religion about a 3-4 min walk to the left from the main entrance. Entrance fee to this smaller cavern is only 5 ringgit and it’s definitely worth it! Batu cave itself is free to visit!

batu caves

KL Bird park

World’s largest free-flight walk-in aviary is how they commercialize themselves and it’s true, that place is quite huge. You can find hundreds of different birds in there from all shapes and sizes. Although the entrance fee is rather high (67 ringgit per person) it’s still an extremely interesting place to visit if you like to see beautiful birds flying around not in their natural habitat but as close to that as possible. Be careful though not to get hit by any of them cause that could happen. Most popular bird in there seemed to be the peacock and constantly they found a reason to show off their beautiful feathers. They are truly quite magnificent!

peacock

Roti booom

Totally out of topic compared to other things in this post but I very quickly just wanted to share my favorite thing to eat here in Malaysia :). They are called Roti booom which back in Estonia would be quite weird since Roti stands for a rat :). Either way they are extremely delicious and I highly recommend to try some while you’re here! Available on the streets but also in frozen form in most of the supermarkets. Just heat the pan, add a little oil and that’s it! Enjoy! 🙂

 

 

SE Asia

KL

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In all the countries that we’re visiting we try to go to the National museum to get a better overview of the country’s history and heritage. And so we did here in KL also. The entrance fee is only 5 ringgit and for that you’ll get access to 4 huge halls containing hundreds of exhibits through earliest days of civilization in this area to present times. There are also several free exhibition halls with various displays.

Right near to the National museum there’s also a police museum which maybe at first doesn’t sound very interesting but actually it’s definitely worth a visit. You can learn a lot about what different equipment has been used in Malaysia and in SE Asia through the years. There are also several different cars, bikes and other machinery on display and it’s totally free. Spending about an hour there is definitely not a bad idea!

In the middle of those 2 places is the National planetarium which we skipped this time since we were quite hot from all the walking and it seemed to be minus degrees in the building. Maybe that will be for some time in the future :).

All in all there are actually quite many museums and similar facilities with free or very inexpensive admittance fees in KL. Back that with all the different parks, beautiful buildings and skyscrapers this city is pretty nice and interesting place to be 🙂

One very good thing in here is the lunchtime on business days. It seems that during this time many different food trucks park themselves on the streets between the buildings and suddenly a huge number of nicely dressed office workers fill the streets to get lunch for themselves. For us it’s also very convenient since you can get an extremely delicious meal for only 6 ringgits (about 1,2€) without walking more than a minute or two.

Also Uber is really inexpensive in KL. Our nearly 60km trip from the airport was 75 ringgit and smaller trips in the city cost no more than 5-15. Of course you have to take under consideration that in some cases you are probably quicker on foot due to the traffic jams.

Tomorrow we plan to visit the famous Batu caves. More about it in the next posts :)!

Sending a lot of sunshine!

Lauri

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SE Asia

Probably the most beautiful park I’ve ever been to + the first video of KL

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Today we went to a little 5 hour walk to the beautiful KL Botanical gardens and orchid farm. These both are part of a vast park located near downtown KL which also contains Butterfly park, Bird park, Hibiscus park, planetarium and lots of different museums and greenery. Although during this time we managed to cover only a certain part of this huge place it was extremely beautiful. Everything is clean, there are plenty of pathways, lakes, ponds, fountains and it’s all combined in such a way that it seems to you that you’re in some sort of wonderland. In addition there are squirrels running around everywhere, different lizards trying to find their food underneath the trees and colorful fish swimming around in ponds. We will definitely go back there during our stay in KL to visit the bird park which we skipped today since we had already been walking for quite some time and also to discover the rest of this magnificent place. In the next videos I’ll also try to give you a small glance of it since it’s quite difficult to do with pictures from a cell-phone.

Our original plan was to go there with a bike since a bike sharing service called oBike is quite popular here. But actually this city is not very good for biking since sidewalks are quite narrow and already occupied with people while there are thousands of cars roaming the streets. In addition for some reason many of the bikes we tried to unlock were broken (as the app promptly told us) and it turns out with one user you can only unlock one bike at a time so we quickly buried this idea. Although for riding around in the park itself they are really good and most likely we will use that option next time.

Meanwhile I also put together the first video of KL so you could get a first overview of what this city is all about 🙂

SE Asia

The towers and glamour of Kuala Lumpur

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I really don’t know where to start this post… so I’ll just start from the beginning. Although many airports in bigger cities are located quite far from the center in case of KL it’s about 60km and at least an hour ride. During this time we saw quite much of the city and surroundings. Near the city there were just acres of palm tree plantations related to Malaysia being the biggest palm oil exporter in the world. But when we neared the city we were astonished by how many skyscrapers there are in KL and nearby locations. And if in other cities I have gazed my eyes upon most of the skyscrapers are some sort of business buildings in here they are mostly residential flats. Some 40-50 stories high with hundreds and hundreds of apartments in them. We’d never seen anything like that before. And in downtown KL it’s the same story. Although it’s known mostly by the famous Petronas twin-towers there are dozens and dozens of same kind of skyscrapers everywhere! I’ve been to Manhattan and similar places but for some reason in KL it really stands out and quite often you find yourself looking above at the heights of these giants. Plus it seems that they are constantly building even more of these, each higher than the previous.

Downtown Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur really can’t be compared. Not to make any harm to BK but the latter is much more cleaner, glamorous and business-like. There is no litter around and everything seems to be tidy. There are several huge parks and forests to go and have a walk and enjoy the jungle in the middle of the city. And when we were staying in Bangkok I wrote about huge shopping malls but KL is on another level! Kuala Lumpur is one of the leading cities in the world for tourism and shopping and it really shows out. 3 out of 10 worlds biggest shopping malls are located in here and the rest are not much smaller. Today we went to 2 of them and it’s quite impossible to describe the scale of these, you just have to see it with your own eyes. Probably the most high-end of these is the Pavilion KL with over 700 (!) stores and every known brand in the world represented. You can see names like Armani, Gucci, Chanel, Valentino, Roberto Cavalli, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Versace etc everywhere! Of course they are supported with Lamborghini’s, Porsche’s and Bentley’s driving around on the streets… And they have quite a Christmas madness here. I made a picture so you’d get a glimpse of what’s going on  🙂

pavilion

Our accommodation is located in dead-center of everything. Biggest shopping malls, markets, nightlife streets, food courts, parks, twin-towers and everything else are just a small walk away. Which is good since we already got to comfortable with riding a scooter for nearly 2 months in Phuket and Langkawi. The building that our apartment is located is not the newest one but everything you could ask for is provided. Huge living room/area shared with 2 other apartments, a balcony, big kitchen and so one. We have also a swimming pool and a small gym on the first floor but our host was so kind to provide us a free pass for the whole 13 days to the well-equipped gym located just at the next building! There’s also a top-notch pool and even a sauna with proper Harvia heater! So there will be a gym and relaxation time planned for each day for our stay in here :).

In tomorrow’s post I’ll share our Langkawi budget and also the second video of our stay on that beautiful island 🙂

All the best!

Lauri