Friday, December 6, 2019; Kelang & Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Friday, December 6, 2019; Kelang (Kuala Lumpur), Malaysia

The weather forecast had been predicting a 40% chance of rain for today in Kuala Lumpur, but as we arrived at the Port of Kelang, gateway to Kuala Lumpur, the sky was just lightly overcast as the sun rose above the horizon.  It was 80 degrees at 6AM, but the humidity had dropped to only 60%.  

We had a quick breakfast and made our way to our departure lounge to pick up our stickers.  We had discussed with some other passengers how it seems no matter how hard you try to be punctual, that someone else always seems to have already grabbed the best seats on the bus. Then we figured that some people are cheating because usually you present your ticket to the shore excursion person in your designated departure lounge, and you are issued your sticker, which designates what excursion (color) and Bus number you are assigned.  You are then instructed to proceed into the theater and are then seated in rows in the order in which you enter.  This is intended to create a system of fairness- those who show up early, get to be lead out to the buses in the order in which they arrive at the theater with their stickers on.  

Passengers with mobility issues are lead out to the buses before the theater cued passengers are called up (fair enough, except that you’ve never seen so many “Mobility issued” passengers run and shove their way out of the lounge and head to the gangway.  

Another way people can cheat is by ducking out of the theater altogether, and then just heading to the gangway without waiting for their group and bus number to be called up in the theater.  As tempted as we were to test out this theory, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to be that dastardly, so we obediently waited in the theater.  

Once off the gangway, numbered groups from different lounges get mixed together with passengers not on excursion, so whoever walks quicker can work their way through the crowds in the terminal to the bus.  That’s considered allowable since some people are so slow, they just jam up traffic if you don’t go around them.  

After our bus for our “Best of Kuala Lumpur” tour was completely boarded, there were a few rows of empty seats at the front that passengers normally leave open so disabled passengers can use them. The bus held 50 passengers, and the tour group was just 32, so once the bus was under way, we scooted up to an open row up front.  This worked out better for us because Janet’s hearing is not so good, and if a buses PA system doesn’t work well, she misses out on all the narration.  We also can hop out of the bus quickly and not jam up the exit like those not as mobile can.  

The Port of Kelang is about a 45 minute drive from downtown Kuala Lumpur.  Malaysia seems to be better developed than Sri Lanka with regards to their secondary roads. Many have a separate parallel lane dedicated for motorcycle traffic, but there is no shortage of wreckless motorcycle speedsters who dart in and out of traffic between lanes of vehicular traffic, even when a motorcycle lane is present.  Leaving the Port of Kelang, the traffic was heavy with large 6 axle Lories, buses and cars, as well as motorcyclists.  While you see some scooters in the side roads, they tend to avoid the expressways.  In Taiwan the scooters outnumbered nearly all other type of vehicular traffic.  

There is a lot of construction evident around and in Kuala Lumpur.  China is helping to finance construction of a high speed rail line to run between Singapore and Thailand, and the support structures for this are very evident.  There are also other rail lines including a monorail in service in Kuala Lumpur.  

The bus got onto an expressway as our guide mentioned an issue of concern to most of the local citizens, and that is the expressways are constructed with taxpayer dollars, but the toll booths are operated by a private company, and not all the funds collected go into maintenance.  The company is a for profit organization, and it so happens that some transportation minister happens to be on some private corporation’s board of directors.  There is apparently a lot of this sort of corruption in Malaysia.  

For the most part, Kuala Lumpur appears modern and clean.  Malaysia is a Muslim majority country, but there is a significant non-Muslim population that derives from migrants from China and India who tend to be Hindu, Buddhist and Christian.  For some reason, they manage to co-exist in Malaysia.  The Muslims tend to be more tolerant than in some more fundamental Islamist countries.  Our guide was of Chinese-Malay extraction, and our driver was of Indian-Malay extraction.  

Looking around the city, the women do wear head scarves, but you don’t really see the total body coverage that we had seen a lot of in the UAE or Oman.  When coming from prayers, many men can be seen wearing prayer caps and a sort of prayer gown, but most men on the street appear normally dressed.  

Our first stop was at the National Monument, which is situated adjacent to the Presidential Palace and Parliament, which are beautiful buildings kept well behind secure fences.  We lucked out on the weather as the sun had burned through the clouds giving us a beautiful sunny day.  Our guide said that was not so common during this monsoon season.  It had been raining pretty hard the prior 3 days.  The National Monument looks a lot like the Iwo Jima monument in Washington DC because it was actually sculpted by the same artist.  To add to that impression, the Malaysian flag has red and white stripes just like the US flag, and a navy blue rectangle in the fly, but their flag contains a Muslim Crescent Moon instead of stars. So if the wind isn’t blowing, it sure looks like an American flag on the pole that is being erected, and the soldiers sure like like Caucasians, not Malaysians.  Perhaps they got a discount on the work.  There are beautiful gardens and water fountains surrounding the monument.

Our next stop was to look at some unusual Moorish architecture of the old central railway station, and then to get a glimpse of the Jasjid Jamek Mosque, which is the largest in Asia with a dome that is over 350 feet in diameter, and a Minaret that at 465 feet, is the tallest in the world.  It is called the Blue Mosque because of it’s blue aluminum sheathed dome.  

The buses took us a short distance to Merdeka (Independence) square, which used to be the cricket field for the Royal Selangor Club- a blast from their British Imperialist Colonial past.  From this square, you can look across history from the old cricket club to the old clock tower, and beyond that the twin Petronus Towers and KL Tower reaching high into the sky.  

Kuala Lumpur literally means “Muddy Confluence”, so we walked to a park where we could see the confluence of the two rivers that mark the spot where Kuala Lumpur was initially established.  For some reason, they have misters along the concrete banks that create an eerie fog that rolls along the river banks.  One of the two rivers carried a lot of litter floating on its surface. There is a Mosque situated at the confluence.  

We then were taken to our mandatory shopping stop, but there as a demonstration of Batik manufacturing on site, and also a nice textile museum highlighting the evolution and history of textile production in Malaysia, including a gallery of celebrated Malaysian textile artists and pioneers. For some reason, our guide had just turned us loose to explore on our own without pointing out the museum specifically, but it appeared to be pretty new, so perhaps he wasn’t aware that it had opened.  

That took us to lunch time, when they lead us up the KL Tower, which at 1381 feet, is twice the height of Seattle’s Space Needle, but contains a rotating restaurant and observation deck.  We had an excellent buffet while enjoying the view of the city’s skyline from that vantage point.  Of all the tours that have included a lunch, this one was by far the best.

After lunch, we made a photo stop at a parking lot with a great view of the Petronas Twin Towers, which at 1400 feet, remain the tallest twin tower structure in the world.  As we snapped our photos, a continuous stream of men came across the parking lot from a nearby mosque, many wearing prayer caps.  They had just completed their mandatory afternoon prayer, and were returning to their offices to work.  

Our final stop was at the National Museum of Malaysia, designed to resemble a grand Malay Palace. There were a number of outdoors exhibits including a traditional Malay House.  You had to take your shoes off and then climb up some steep stairs to get into the house built on stilts.  Because most Malays lived close to the rivers, they did have to build their homes on stilts to deal with the regular monsoon season floods, and also because tigers don’t seem to like going up stairs or ladders.  

We learned that Malaysia was put on the map by major tin deposits, which were it’s first source of wealth.  Later, oil and natural gas reserves, most off shore, generated a lot of wealth.  Petronas is the National Petroleum and Natural Gas company.  They also have a large automotive industry.  Their biggest local products are passenger cars by Proton and Perodua.  There were a lot of unfamiliar automobile logos to us on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. 

The national sport of Malaysia is Badminton, but they also have an up and coming national sport is called Sepak raga bulatan which combines volley ball and soccer using a rattan ball. No use of the hands is allowed.

There were lots of interesting artifacts in several galleries organized into natural history, cultural history, and political development.  Malaysia has a long and complicated history with the Portuguese, Dutch and then British exerting colonial control, followed by independence from the Britain in 1957 complicated by a long and bloody Communist insurgency they call the “Malaysian Emergency”.  By the time we got through the museum, we were thoroughly exhausted, and glad to have the opportunity to nap in the bus as it drove us back to the port.  

They did have some Wifi in the cruise port terminal, so we tried to upload more pictures and update our emails, but we really didn’t have much time before we had to reembark the ship.  

It felt so good to strip off our sticky and sweat drenched clothes and hop into the shower.  Life is so much more comfortable on the ship than out on the streets of many of our destinations that we genuinely look forward to returning “home” after our excursions.  

After a nice sit down dinner, we headed to the theater to see the last show of the Cellist/Tenor duo of Branden and James.  It was a fantastic show with truly imaginative and fun arrangements of popular and classical music.  If you ever get a chance to see them on a cruise ship, or in Australia, where they usually tour, don’t miss them.  

We had our last music trivia for this cruise. We played with a young Spanish couple who walked in late and joined us.  They would have won because they knew all the songs, but didn’t hear the first 4 songs and we had no idea what 2 of the first 4 songs were.  We got all the other songs right. The category was classic rock, but our knowledge of grunge and heavy metal put us in a severe handicap. 

We finished up the night listening to a performance of AJ Clarke on The Songbook of the Piano men.  He put on a very enjoyable and educational show featuring music of Elton John, Barry Manilow, and Billy Joel.  

The whole evening had a sort of sad sentimental feeling cast over it because most of the passengers are disembarking.  There are 200 of us who are continuing on the ship after it docks in Singapore tomorrow, but all our friends that we have met will be leaving tomorrow.  There were hugs exchanged all over the ship.  

The ship has no organized excursion for us “In Transit” passengers who will reboard the ship for it’s next cruise tomorrow, so we will head into the terminal tomorrow with our passports to clear immigration and then see if we can find either a Hop-On-Hop-Off tour, or figure out the subway.  We’d like to see the Marina Bay Sands Hotel observation deck and the Gardens By The Bay on our own tomorrow, since those are not part of the later Princess organized debarkation tour that we can take when we return to Singapore at the end of this next cruise segment which goes up to Phuket Thailand, and then down to Bali before returning to Singapore.