Monday, February 27, 2017

Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Langkawi

Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Langkawi

This part of my trip was decided based on what flights were available out of India into SE Asia. After doing some reading on the country I decided to stay for a couple of weeks rather than a couple of nights. Kuala Lumpur was a nice change of pace coming from India, it reminded me of Seoul. Just a huge city with lots of strongly air conditioned shopping malls. The food was great. Great fruits, great seafood, great Malaysian and international foods. KL has a really amazing cityscape as well. One bad thing about Malaysia was that despite being a lower temperature than Kochi, it felt much hotter due to humidity.





Penang is an island in the northern part of Malaysia. There is an old post-colonial city called George Town. Very cool city, some of the best street food I have ever had and really cool street art all over the town. There is a mixture of cultures here between Muslim and Chinese which gives the island a very cool vibe.











I was flying out of KL in a few days so I came up with a genius plan to take a ferry to Langkawi, which is considered one of the best tropical beaches in SE Asia, and fly back to KL airport late the night before my flight the next morning. This worked out great because there is a cube hotel at the airport where you can shower and get a nice bed for a few hours. Anyway, I didn't do any swimming at Langkawi, one of the best beaches in the world. I read about people dying from box jellyfish and I was really looking for an excuse not to swim. I took a boat tour of the mangrove forest. To be honest it felt very forced for tourism. Kind of like a tourist trap. It wasn't awful, actually it was very pretty, but I didn't love Langkawi. It strikes me as the kind of place families bring their kids to sit on a beach for a week.

Next Stop Laos.






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