Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur, a city that tries to attract visitors with the slogan: 'Luxury at affordable prices'. While we had a good time overall, the city fell short of our expectations and, unlike other destinations in the country, was disappointing. A major issue seems to be rapid growth without any energy dedicated to urban planning concepts. Everything is big, too big, too many skyscrapers, but upon closer inspection, often more appearance than substance. The city structure resembles that of a village in some areas, and the traffic situation is (unnecessarily) disastrous. When we used public transport, we had to endure incredibly complicated routes. The individual lines seemed to be built completely independently of each other. With a car (taxi), one could feel trapped for hours in an endless traffic jam, regardless of the time of day. Thus, we often walked, but it was unfortunate that sidewalks often ended abruptly, making it mostly rather uncomfortable. Sometimes there were crossings over the roads, but they were so awkwardly designed that we considered it a success not to break our feet on stairs with varying heights during this zigzag course. However, we could ride the monorail, which was not possible in Melaka with the abandoned ghost train. A sobering experience, as this thing moved only awkwardly and jerkily at a snail's pace, truly regressive. Our station, directly across from our accommodation, was so intelligently planned that there was no way to get to the correct side of the street for us (even though the station was above the multi-lane road). We had to fight our way across the road and its barriers through dense traffic, of course without a pedestrian crossing (or with a 500m detour). How can such a thing happen???

Interestingly, the apartment buildings in the city stood out; during our two stays, we rented a small apartment each time. The skyscrapers with more than 30-50 floors were cobbled together in low-budget mode, unfortunately with far too few elevators. This led to very long waiting times during peak hours, especially when cleaning crews monopolized one elevator entirely. But there were nice rooftop pools with great views of the city. Furthermore, it was noticeable that each apartment had its own hot water supply in the form of instantaneous water heaters and its own cooling system(s), so the potential efficiency gain of a skyscraper with central supply was not utilized at all. In these towers with several hundred units, everyone effectively cools and heats individually. An ecological approach looks different. Fire safety, however, was surprisingly good, built in such a way that spatial separation almost certainly prevents the spread of fire.

The museums like the National Art Gallery didn't wow us, but it was interesting to see that these seemed to be popular spots for (first?) dates. In any case, we could observe discreet hand-holding and fleeting hugs, especially among teenagers. The Batu Caves a bit outside the city, the Sri Maha Mariamman Temple, or the Petronas Towers were nice, but nothing more.

What really pleased us was meeting Marike's former colleague and friend Lukas and his family, who were on vacation in Malaysia. A truly lovely evening in a nice rooftop bar with great stories and memories.

Our really nice time in Malaysia has now come to an end, and we moved on to Indonesia. Initially, we wanted to take the ferry to Sumatra, but by now, so many ferry connections have been canceled that the whole thing felt a bit too complicated and unreasonable (even though a one-hour flight from KL to Medan felt silly, taking the boat and various modes of transport would have taken several days).