We arrived in KL in the very early morning and searched out a hostel in Chinatown, the backpacker heart of the city. We got lost with a group of other backpackers from our bus and overshot Chinatown. The others took a taxi back while Maren and I backtracked. The place we found put us up for free in a dorm room to sleep for a few hours. We caught up on our bus-induced sleep deprivation and moved into our room. KL is an interesting and unique city, though not necessarily for a backpacker. It is very modern and commercial, but there is not much more than a day or two worth of tourist sights. In fact, the food is a bigger reason to visit the city than just about any other attraction. We first visited the huge national mosque. Malaysia is an Islamic country, though not in the Middle Eastern style. Here, there seems to be much more tolerance and less fundamentalism. The mosque even had English pamphlets with titles like ‘So do Muslims really have to pray 5 times a day?’ and ‘How to convert to Islam: It’s easier than applying for a visa!’ Maren did have to wear special clothing to enter the mosque. But instead of just giving her a head covering, they gave her a head-to-toe purple cape. She looked hilarious!
We next visited a gigantic park. KL has lots of parks filled with rainforest to escape the surrounding urban metropolis. This one had a nice lake with fountains and a deer park, both regular deer and mouse deer. Our hostel hosted a free rooftop barbeque in the evening. It was filled with delicious Malaysian food and we ate till we were completely full. There was a huge variety of noodle and rice dishes along with barbequed meat. We stayed on the roof with the other backpackers to watch the World Cup afterwards. In the morning, we woke up early to get to the city’s famous twin towers with the connecting bridge/viewing platform. We arrived fairly early, but not soon enough to book a trip up the towers. They reached the maximum number of entries per day just as we arrived. Instead, we walked through a cool park in the jungle right in the city center to another very tall building. This was a communications tower with an observation deck much higher and with better views than the twin towers. The walk through the jungle was fun as we saw and heard a troop of monkeys. The views from the tower showed every side of KL.
We left KL in the afternoon by bus and arrived in Singapore later in the evening. As soon as we reached Singapore, I could tell the city was far more modern and advanced than anywhere we had seen in SE Asia. The border had a massive building with thousands of people shuffling through customs when we arrived. We found the only cheap hostel in town later in the evening. Prices in Singapore are nearly comparable to large cities in other first-world countries. The city is clean and orderly as I had expected, but I never noticed any strict laws or ‘police state’ type rules that I had heard about. The city is also covered in numerous rivers and canals. The weather was warm and humid, but not as hot as Thailand.
We spent our first full day walking through the city. We visited two temples, one Hindu and one Buddhist, both with phenomenal designs. The Buddhist temple actually had an elevator which reached several floors, including a small museum and an outdoor rooftop garden. We continued on to yet another well-decorated Buddhist temple before making our way toward the water. We walked through the financial district where the ultra-modern skyscrapers made us forget we were even in SE Asia. After a statue of a bizarre water-shooting beast, we circled back toward our hostel. We stopped at a dessert restaurant, which are very popular in Singapore. We tried a few strange desserts, including grass jelly and peanut paste. Many of the popular desserts and drinks that seem like they should be sweet are in fact not sweet at all. It is very strange that none of the different flavors are emphasized with any sugar.
We returned after our long day of walking back at the hostel, when I noticed something horrible. Maren’s wallet, which I had been carrying with me in the bottom pocket of my cargo shorts, was missing! The bottom of the pocket had a huge hole ripped across it which revealed what had happened. My cheap shorts had failed in the worst possible way. We spent the next two days in Singapore attempting to track down the missing wallet. We retraced all of our steps for the entire walk we had gone on. We talked to people working at every place we had stopped. We filed a police report and followed up at two different police stations (on a side note, it was strangely difficult to find a police station). The wallet had Maren’s debit and credit cards, which were the only sources we had been getting cash from. It also had her ID, driver’s license, etc., but the most immediate concern for us was getting money for the rest of our trip.
We both recognized the irony that I was able to get my lost camera back from the seemingly dishonest rickshaw drivers of Delhi yet couldn’t get a lost wallet back from the honest and law-abiding Singaporeans. We were getting desperate, but fortunately Maren’s father (the ‘Packrat’ :) ) stepped in to the rescue. He has a friend who lives in Singapore who we were able to contact. We met up with him and received a supply of cash to last us the next few weeks through China. Lucky! Unfortunately we didn’t hear any positive information from the police by the time of our scheduled flight to Hong Kong. We left Singapore very disappointed about the wallet, but we had money and passports, which is all we needed to continue on. After a quick ride on the metro and a short flight across the water, we landed mid-morning in Hong Kong.
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