TIME OUT
Straddling the past and the future
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The Hop-on Hop-off coach tour of Kuala Lumpur has 22 stops, taking one through 42 major tourist attractions that showcase the city’s tremendous growth and transformation over the years. HUGH and COLLEEN GANTZER
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There is, clearly, a determined civic effort to preserve Malaysia’s heritage without calling on the loutish hypocrisies of a moral police.
Photos: Hugh and Colleen Gantzer.
Time-line tour: The coach that takes you through KL in your language;
The voice guided us. It led us through space and time; allowed us to pause and examine things along the way; and then re-join the time-line. Our voyage started in the early 19th century, in the soggy sangam of the Gombok and Kelang
rivers. Here Chinese tin miners had built their shacks and as their prosperity, and that of their town, grew, the world forgot that Kuala Lumpur had originally meant “The Muddy Confluence”.
Can do better
This humid morning, Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers had thrust their jewelled fingers outside our hotel window: defiantly asserting to the world that “Anything you can do, we can do better!” Now, we wanted to find out how this Asian Tiger, this democratic monarchy — Malaysia has a king elected for a five-year term by his peers — had surged into the future while still preserving its past. We crossed the street, stopped under a sign that said “KL Hop-On Hop-Off 1”.
We had chosen this coach-tour because it had 22 stops, giving access to over 42 major tourist attractions; the stops were within walking distance of over 100 hotels; its tickets, sold on board, in hotels and by travel agents, were valid for 24 hours; its four buses covered the circular route in two hours from 8.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. seven days a week ; passengers could hop on and hop off as often as they liked with a bus arriving every half-hour; and the commentaries on their headphones were spoken in eight languages: Bahasa Malaysia, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, Hindi and English, with the option of the language preferred by the majority of passengers coming over the coaches’ speakers. For 38 Ringgits, it seemed an irresistible deal.
KL as never seen before
The coach arrived. We climbed to the roofed upper deck. The commentary was switched on. And we saw KL as we had never seen it before.
The route has been colour-coded into Shopping Areas, Green Spaces, Commercial Regions where corporate houses reign supreme, Heritage Sections with beautiful old buildings and shrines like mosques, churches and the towering Sri Mahamariamman Temple, and Fun Places. The two Indian families on our coach got off, excitedly, at Stop 6 in the heart of the Shopping Area and we did not see them again. Four American couples, bristling with cameras and loud anecdotes, disembarked at Stop 9, Petaling Street in China Town, loudly determined to dine on Birds’ Nest Soup and other vegetarian Chinese dishes. A group of vociferous Italians, alive with guide-books and gestures, poured out at Stop 12, and headed for the National Museum. We stayed the course.
Melting pot
KL is rich with greenery, avenues and gardens; where people are gently law-abiding and obey traffic signals on busy streets but are not as rigidly disciplined as their law-fearing neighbours in Singapore. We passed Malay girls in traditional head-scarves, Chinese girls with tight jeans and mini skirts, Indian girls wearing jeans, foreign women dressed more like the Indian girls than the Chinese. We saw no grunge-and-grime budget-budget international drop-outs: possession of drugs earns the death penalty in Malaysia. There is, clearly, a determined civic effort to preserve Malaysia’s heritage without calling on the loutish hypocrisies of a moral police. And though a former Prime Minister had weaned Malaysians from their obsession with British goods by launching the slogan “Buy British Last”, there was no overt destruction of its colonial heritage. The impressive Sultan Abdul Samad Building would have fitted in effortlessly in Lutyens’ Delhi with its Islamic features being ascribed to the Mughals. The well-preserved, British-era, St. Mary’s Church is the attraction served by Stop 17 in this forward-looking Islamic State.
From the past we headed into the 21st century’s Stop 4, the fascinating state-of-the art Aquaria and Stop 14 accessing both the Orchid Garden and the Bird Park. We had seen these attractions on earlier visits.
The Eye on Malaysia
At the end of the tour, we hopped off, caught a taxi, and returned to see the attractions that had caught our eyes on this tour but had escaped our attention before.
Refreshingly different
One of these was the KL Craft Complex at Jalan Conlay. It was an eye-opener: a treasure trove of handicrafts to see, to buy, even to create. We saw visitors learning how to paint. We could even have tried our hand at batik or ceramics, if we had had the time: the story of our lives! We visited the studio of a former financial adviser to a corporate house who had turned away from number crunching and developed his own unique art. He recreates traditional gold designs of things like brooches, buckles and clasps but he makes them of pewter and then has them gold-washed. One of the Sultans of Malaysia had commissioned a whole set of badges for the guests at his coronation.
The crafts centre.
Driving on to the coach’s Stop 14, we entered a dense, humid, tropical forest, netted against birds and other predators, where 6,000 butterflies filled the air like the living chips of a kaleidoscope. This was the Butterfly Park: as enchanting as if we had stepped into another, more delicate and very fragile, world. Just in case the flowers on the plants do not produce enough nectar, the butterflies can dine on trays of red hibiscus blossoms sprayed with a mixture of 10 per cent honey and 90 per cent water.
Elevated view
At the end of the day, we drove to Stop 21: Lake Titiwangsa. Here, rising out of a plaza filled with holiday makers, was the 60 meter high observation wheel, Eye on Malaysia. We rode the illuminated eye when darkness fell, witnessed a spectacular laser show, and saw KL grow beneath us. The ride was advertised as a 15-minute circuit but ours went around three times. And so, because of the repeated rounds, and through the rain-speckled dome of our capsule and the razzle-dazzle of the burgeoning city, we got fleeting glimpses of the muddy confluence; the kuala lumpur.
From the depths of our memories echoed the phrase that awesome old aunts had often inflicted on us as nervous children: “My! How you’ve grown!”
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