Category: Malaysia (2000)

We flew from KL to Langkawi the next day, and arrived in a TINY little airport. We took a taxi home with some other foreigners from Austrailia? and they told us about some good beaches to go to. We found our hotel, and went to the beach for a nice tropical dinner on the sand. The next day we went around where our hotel was looking at the shops and such. I always wonder why a hotel would bother having a pool when you could walk just 2 minutes and lie on the beach… oh well. Keiko decided to take a parasail ride over the beach, while I waded in the water. It was soooo relaxing! Not many tourists were there, and it was nice just to rest. We went to the different stalls around for great cheap food>> meals for as cheap as $.75 for a lot of good stomach filling food. Unfortunately, this vacation came to an end, and we had to fly back to Singapore to get our flight the next morning for Japan.

On the flight back to Japan however, I got to see a great view of Mt. Fuji from the air. Coming back to Japan was fun, because I was meeting Traci to go tour the rest of Japan. Boy, that day was really tiring for both of us. We went to Tokyo to get back to my apartment.

We spent touring the different sights around KL all today. The financial district and religious areas were really interesting to see. The architecture of the buildings were really interesting and had been designed to reflect the religion of the area. This was a much bigger city than I thought, but it was fairly easy and cheap to get around. The best place we went was definitely to see the Twin Towers. Unfortunately the top is not open to the public for viewing, but just standing next to the monstrous structure was reward enough. On the inside bottom floors were great restaurants, and out back was a nice park. It was so hot, that getting in the water was a great relief! That night we saw a traditional Malaysian show at a restaurant. On our way home, we stopped in front of Hard Rock Café Kuala Lumpur for a picture.

Even though we stayed in KL just for 2 days, it was enough to see the major landmarks around the city. Plus, after this big trip, we were really excited to just go to Langkawi for a nice relaxing few days on the beaches.

Because of the convenient location of Singapore at the bottom of Malaysia, we decided to take a train across into Malaysia. This trip was not only going to be interesting, but relaxing too, as we opted for a side trip from Kuala Lumpur, to a little desolate island located at the border of Thailand an Malaysia called Langkawi. We left our hotel in the morning to go to the train station. Unfortunately, I got there, and realized I had left my passport in the safe at the hotel. So, I had to travel a lone all the way back to the hotel located in the Muslim section of Singapore. I got back fine, but ran the entire way to and from the train stations to save as much time as possible, because we didn’t want to miss our train. Our train went straight for Kuala Lumpur. Well, to say straight is a little misnomer, because of how many stops it took for us to get there.

After a good eight hours of riding the train through jungle terrain, we arrived in KL. We arrived at night, and had a nice dinner at Pizza Hut, where we saw the fattest man I had ever seen in my entire life. Anyhow, after dinner we went to find our hotel which I had booked from the internet. We had an awesome view of KL at night, given that the Petronas Twin Towers were towering and sparkling at night. It was truly a magnificent sight.