Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

Finally after 4 days, I managed to get some direction and headed out of KL. I got an email from Ben, who I met 2 months before at the Hanoi Backpackers. He said he was heading to the Perhentians so I decided to go to Long Beach to meet up with him. There were a four Brits that were also heading up there so I figured it’d be good to head out with them on the local long distance bus in the middle of the night. It’s usually better to travel in a group especially when u r not sure where u r going to end up at 4am because most individual travelers depend on each other for just about everything.

The bus dropped us off in Jerteh (middle of nowhere) as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. We found ourselves in a dimly lit bus stop with only a few taxis hanging around trying to rip us off for the short trip to the port in Kuala Besut. These Brits were pretty much idiots and had no barganing skills whatsoever so they paid what was asked. The Taxis wanted 20RM(~$6) for the trip when the bus ride all the way from Kuala Lumpur (7 hours) cost 30RM. There were 5 of us and we were not going to fit in 1 taxi with all our packs. The four of them decided to hop in a taxi and head to the pier leaving me on my own. Fair enough, they had been traveling together and really didn’t owe me anything, but come on.

Only complete twats, pictured here, would leave a lone traveler in a dim bus station by himself at 4am and ask him to foot the whole taxi bill by himself instead of splitting 2 taxis btw/ 5 people. I guess they thought it was worth it to save 2RM each (.55 cents) though. All I have to say is Karma. Anyway, by myself, I negotiated the fare down to 10RM and ended up at the ticket office a few minutes after them. Unfortunately, it was 5am and still 2 hours before the first boat. Now lets talk about instant Karma coming to get you. The girls realized that they didn’t have enough money so they had to take a taxi back to the nearest ATM (in Jerteh) and back to get more cash because the island doesn’t have any ATMs. LOL

After almost 13 years, I’ve returned to KL. I didn’t see much of KL the last time I was here because I spent most of my time in KL studying at Poh Gong Temple, a Taoist/Buddhist temple. But since I’m not a big fan of big cities, KL never has had much to offer. The only thing that remotely interested me was the ummm… “tallest twin tower buildings in the world”. They used to claim to be the tallest building in the world, but there is some doubt that it was ever really the tallest since the Sear’s Tower in my home town of Chicago is actually taller 1518ft vs 1483ft if you include the spires on top of both buildings. But in 2004 Taipei 101 eclipsed both for sure at 1670ft, which will soon be topped by a massive 2400+ft building in Dubai.

But I digress.

I find out that they only let like 1000 people up the towers everyday and if ur not in line by 9am, ur not getting up to the observation deck. The funny thing about Petronas Towers is that their observation deck in only 41 stories high on the bottom level of the skybridge. Now since I didn’t have anything else I wanted to do in KL and I was already there at 8:30am, I decided to wait in line to get my ticket to go up to the skybridge at 12:30pm. But all the time I’m thinking to myself that 41 stories is not that high nor very impressive since I’ve been to Taipei 101 already and hell, I’ve lived in a 34th story penthouse suite in Hong Kong set in the mid-levels that were higher than this stupid skybridge.

Fortunately after I finally got a ticket, KLCC mall and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel are in the same complex and they’re air conditioned! If you’re in KL, I totally do not recommend wasting 4 hours of your life to see the “vista” from the skybridge.