This is a bit about Kualar Lumpur, but is mostly about my woes with trying to write a novel travel novel
Monday, May 5th, 2008One morning in Chiang mai I woke up with the grandest of intentions and ambitions. I want to write a book about my trip around the world, or at least the first half of it. Travel books are a dime a dozen and for the most part they are 
(in my opinion) pretty poorly written – even the much lauded Bill Bryson bores me to tears. So, my twist? My way of making the book interesting or novel is this. I want to improve my irish, I want to write the book in such away that it teaches me how to write and speak in irish. The book would start off in english, I would write about the trip while slowly bringing in the irish to eventually finish the book in irish with the person reading it having no problems with the language by the end. Whether that seems to you a good idea or not doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is that this particular morning, over that particular bowl of rice soup, this idea blew my mind apart. It got me excited, I could really do this. I saw none of the obvious difficulties, I was invincible. When I arrived in chiang mai my first stop was a book shop where I saw the ‘Teach your self Gaelic’. My plan that morning was to track down that book and get cracking that afternoon on the first great english/irish travel novel.
Finding the book was a pain in the hole, there are a dozen second hand book shops in chiang mai which is great when you don’t know what you are looking for but when you do and its such a rare specimen as a book to teach you a language that in global terms, a handful of people can speak with any degree of confidence – its a bloody nightmare. Over and back across town, I got it eventually. I stopped just short of punching the air in delight, I rushed up to the counter and happily parted with the necessary amount mullah before scurrying off to take my first irish lesson in 10 years. Across the moate and back into old chiang mai I sat at my favourite caf, ordered some more soup and opened the book. Bloody scottish!!!
Firmly back in my non novelist box myself and bobby took to the skies away from thailand on our long winded way to Manila. 3 hours on the plane to KL went pretty quickly. We made our way into the hustle bustle of late afternoon KL chinatown. We made for the local youth hostel who were gladly able to put us up for the night, they even had a tv where I could watch the pools rather unfortunate demise from this years CL.
KL is one mightily impressive city, its the veritable concrete jungle. Planning permission gets denied on the account of buildings being too small or too conservative. Bigger, better, ridiculous than anything I have ever seen. We took a lift to the top of the Petronas towers which gave us a fantastic view of the city and coincided quite fortunately with an amazing sunset. The city even has its own twin towers, bigger than the ones that no longer exist manhatten side, standing underneath them gives you the impression that you have been dropped into the middle of a science fiction film.
Our second and final day in KL we regressed back to our pre-teen years. We went to an indoor theme park, my first ever rollercoaster (twice). Its good fun!!! Though bumping cars against 7 year old malaysian kids is better fun. Its a good and relatively economical way of passign a couple of hours – beats sitting in the pub thats for sure. KL is a cool city, but I don’t feel the need to dwell there that long on my return in a couple of weeks time. Its population is a strange mix of indian and chinese people, so at times it was like walking around india with the exception being that there were decent roads and actual pavements. The food in the capital was pretty poor but I am told it gets much better up around georgetown which will be my first port of call when I return….
Slan,
Phil
Phil Gill