Date: March 20, 2007
Location: Port Kelang (Kuala Lumpur), Malaysia
Next Port: Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia, March 21
Quick Summary: We enjoyed a great day in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s largest city. It is awonderful mixture of Malay, Chinese and Indian cultures with Islamic and European influences. We took the ship’s “highlights” tour of Kuala Lumpur and then headed out on our own before catching the ship’s transfer bus back to the ship
Report: We arrived at Port Kelang at about 8:00 a.m. and left shortly after for our 1-1/2 hour bus ride to Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur – KL for short – is one of Southeast Asia’s smallest capitals with a population of about two million. The city isn’t a particularly old one. In 1857, when miners discovered tin between two murky rivers – Kuala Lumpur means “muddy confluences” in Malay – Chinese traders promptly set up shop and the city was born. The British moved in during the 1880s. After the Japanese occupation of World War II, local Communist groups fought the authorities during what was called the Emergency (1948-1960). Britain finally granted Malaysia its independence in 1957 and stayed to help fight and finally subdue the terrorists.
Now Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur are beacons of racial and ethnic harmony. Malays make up 60% of the population, Chinese - 30%, Indian - 7% and Eastern Malaysia - 3% (the former headhunters in Borneo). (Continuing readers of this journal will remember that Malaysia is comprised of 11 states, 2 of which are on the island of Borneo, some 300 miles east of the Malaya Peninsula.)
Our first photo stop was at the Sultan Salkahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah Mosque (1988) – commonly called the Blue Mosque. Its dome is the second largest in the world and its 470-foot minarets are the world’s tallest. It’s a very beautiful spot, but we were disappointed that non-Muslims are not allowed to visit the inside.
Next we stopped at the King’s Palace – Istana Negra, the official residency of His Majesty, the Yang di Pertuan Agong, King of Malaysia.
(Each of the nine main provinces is headed by a sultan. Since the formation of current Malaysia in1963, every five years one of them is selected to be king – the head of state – for one five-year term, with the position rotating through all the sultans. Elections in Parliament are held every five years and seats are allocated proportionally by ethnic background. Ever since the formation of the country, one party has been in power and is comprised of a proportionate number of Malays, Chinese and Indians. It’s a rather unique form of democracy that has worked quite well for 40+ years ever since the Communists were kicked out.)
The palace grounds were magnificent with a horde of gardeners working to keep it that way. Everyone (except us) had fun taking their pictures with the horse guards and those palace guards with funny gold fabric skirts. The King splits his time between his palace in Kuala Lumpur and a larger, more magnificent one in Putrajaya – an ultramodern administrative capital city that’s about 40km away from KL.
Next we visited the National Monument that honors all those who fought in World War II and also for Malaysia’s independence. The centerpiece is a 50-foot bronze statue of the freedom fighters by sculptor Felix De Weldon. He also designed the Iwo Jima War Memorial in Washington, DC. (The King had seen that memorial and commissioned De Weldon to build a similar one in KL.)
Our next stop was at the Thean Hou Temple (opened in 1989). This striking, six-tiered temple is one of the largest in Chinese temples in Southeast Asia and is a very special place for the Hainanese community. It contains beautiful statues of the Goddess of the Heavenly Mother, the Goddess of Mercy and the Goddess of the Waterfront. It was a bright and colorful stop with many details to please the eye.
Our tour concluded at Independence Square with its contrasting architecture. On one side are government administrative buildings built in the Indian style. On another are stucco and timbered building with red tile roofs that are definitely British in style. In between is a grass field that used to be the cricket pitch and is now used for soccer. Across the way is the Jame Mosque featuring graceful arches and domes, reminiscent of Moorish architecture. And surrounding everything are tall ultra modern steel and glass buildings.
We walked about a block to see the confluence of the two (rather narrow at this point) rivers from which Kuala Lumpur got its name.
This was the end of the tour. Rather than head straight back to the ship, we split off on our own. After using an ATM to get some Ringgits (RMR 3.7 to $1), we took a taxi to the Petronas Twin Towers. We had been warned not to take un-metered cabs. But when our driver said it would be RMR 10, we thought that was very reasonable and hopped in. Traffic was terrible, and it took about 20 minutes to get to our destination. In the meantime we had a delightful conversation with our Malay cab driver. (So, being the big spenders, we gave him 20 RMR – 10 for his fare and 10 for his granddaughter, of whom he was so proud. Compared to Chicago, we thought $5.40 was very reasonable. The shorter ride back to the bus transfer point in a metered cab was20 RMR…proving wrong the caution not to take non-metered cabs.)
The 88-story Petronas Twin Towers are something else. When completed, they were the tallest buildings in the world at 1,482 feet – just beating out the Sears Tower (1,451 ft.) in our hometown of Chicago. Since their completion in 1998, they have been surpassed by the Taipei 101 in Taiwan at 1,667 feet. (Two other buildings we’ve visited on this trip rank up there also: Jin Mao, Shanghai, #4 at 1,380 ft. and Two International Finance Center, Hong Kong, #5 at 1,362 ft.)
The buildings resemble two mosque minarets and have surprising grace for their size. They are connected at the 41st and 42ns floors by a double-decked skybridge. It serves two purposes – allowing employees of the national gas company that occupies 60 percent of the building to transfer from one to the other more easily, and it also provides a quick escape route if there were an emergency in one of the towers.
The tower floor patterns are in the form of offsetting or dynamic squares that form an eight-pointed star, significant in the Muslim religion. Lots of corner offices! As explained in the building’s visitor center: “The eight-pointed star is also an ideogram for the fourness in many creations. These include the four cardinal directions– North, South, East and West; the four elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water; the four physical conditions – Hot, Cold, Dry and Moist. And so on. The octagon is a central figure in the composition and meaning of art representing the path of return to unity.” If you can follow all that, it makes some sense! Or, have we been floating around on a ship too long?
In any case, it’s a beautiful building. We were too late to get tickets to visit the skybridge, but we did enjoy a Malaysian lunch at Kelantan Delights in the five-story shopping center at the base of one of the towers. We both had large soup bowls filled with all sorts of specialties. Larry’s was spicy hot; Karen’s not at all. Both were delicious.
The trip back to the ship was uneventful. We did note that along side the toll road were separate roadways for motorbikes. It was quite ingenious how they built them under and through the overpasses and four-leaf clovers.
We enjoyed another very memorable day on our journey.
Karen and Larry
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Photos of our day in Kuala Lumpur have been added.
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