Sorry for the Group Email

The thing that kept us going in the jungle in Taman Negara was the thought of a comfortable few days in Kuala Lumpur. When you’re cracking your head on every third branch and flicking leeches off your ankles, the thought of an air-conditioned room with cable TV and a minibar means an awful lot.

We weren’t ready, unfortunately, for Kuala Lumpur. It’s extravagantly large, extremely expensive by Malaysian standards, and generously polluted. We arrived at ten in the morning on the train, and took the metro to Chinatown. Chinatown might be a good place to visit for a few hours, but it quickly dawned on us that it was a terrible place to stay. We saw no fewer than six hotels in under two hours, a seemingly-endless torrent of tight, grubby rooms with no air-conditioning, saggy beds and gratuitous prices.

We settled, in the end, for the bizarre and archaic YWCA. The YWCA is like the YMCA, except it doesn’t have a catchy theme tune and you’re not allowed to stay there if you’re a single male. The room was damp and the furniture dated from the mid-sixties. That said, it had a well-stocked library, borderline-friendly service and the exorbitant rate included breakfast.

In the event, Kuala Lumpur was a disappointment. It’s an enormous city with a shade over seven million people living in its greater metropolitan area. But, unlike London, or Paris, the green space, instead of being spread around the city, is all located in one place, the Perdana Lake Gardens.

Luckily the green space has its share of attractions. We visited the Kuala Lumpur bird park, for instance. I’m generally fairly averse to birds, having once enjoyed the horrific experience of scooping a dead one into a bin before work, but I was won over. The bird park has more than 5,000 of the flutterers, and the world’s largest enclosed, free-range aviary. In practice this means it’s entirely possible to be landed on by a parakeet, pecked at by a hornbill and attacked by a peacock all in one afternoon. After the yellow fug of the rest of Kuala Lumpur it was a welcome relief. If you’re in town for 48 hours, this should be on your itinerary.

Kuala Lumpur also has south-east Asia’s largest mall. The Berjaya Times Square Mall incorporates not only an astonishing number of shops, but also an apartment complex, two five-star hotels, four thousand entrances and, get this, a rollercoaster.

It was bliss to visit. Two minutes outdoors in Kuala Lumpur may well be the equivalent to smoking eighteen years’ worth of Marlborough’s, but it’s the temperature that leaves you reeling. The beauty of an air-conditioned space in a place like Kuala Lumpur is hard to underestimate.

Unfortunately, Kuala Lumpur seemed resolute in its efforts to remain dislikable. Times Square might be very nice inside, but I struggle to reconcile the obvious need for comfort with air-conditioning the open-air foyer outside. On the one hand it makes walking past the mall rather comforting – doubtless to pull you in. On the other hand, the Malaysians are effectively attempting to air-condition the open air, which besides being an exercise in utter uselessness somewhere as hot as Malaysia, seems to be a particularly aggressive middle finger to the environment.

But what do I know? As soon as we stepped off the train in Kuala Lumpur, my camera, which had been acting up ever since I let it take the brunt of a sheet of water off the coast of Thailand, gave up the ghost entirely. I diagnosed the problem as a faulty power switch, which was concurrently comforting and exasperating. On the one hand, a power switch seemed like it would be rather easier and cheaper to replace than, say, the shutter blades. On the other hand, I was carrying a camera that worked perfectly except for a wholly crucial cubic half-centimetre of plastic. So Kuala Lumpur might be fabulous, and I was just blinded to it by irritation and distress at having killed my camera. In further mitigation, we were exhausted. We’d been setting a fast pace since Bangkok the second, and it’s quite possible that Kuala Lumpur isn’t the best place to go if you’re battling exhaustion.

Dave recommends Kuala Lumpur. In extremely small doses. More pictures, as ever, in the Flickr set.