When you book the cheap flights on budget airlines, most of the time you get stuck with crappy flight times and weird layovers. Jeff and I have been really lucky so far, and have minimal layovers on most of our flights. However, the cheapest flight we could find from Cambodia to Japan took us through Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for about 16 hours. Luckily for us, we arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the morning and didn’t leave until the red-eye super late that night.
Even though the KL airport is one of the nicest in the world, we didn’t want to hang out in an airport all day. Especially since we were there only a few days after the mysterious Kim Jong-nam fiasco (wah-wah). Anyway, we stored our luggage, and bought tickets to get into town on the train and then take the hop-on, hop-off bus around town. This was our first hop-on, hop-off bus for our entire trip!
We wouldn’t really recommend the hop-on, hop-off bus because the pickups were unreliable and the information provided was pretty lame. The bus route ends at 8pm, and they mean 8pm. We were in the middle of the bus route and got kicked off quite a way from the train station to the airport. But it did make pretty good financial sense because the bus ticket included a train ticket to and from the airport to Kuala Lumpur city. We saw most of the major sites in the city including the Petronas twin towers, KL observation tower, Merdeka Square, and ate at the Central Market.
Kuala Lumpur was just another big city to us, except it had much more Islamic influence than any other Asian city we had been to. I would say it is very similar to Singapore, which makes sense since they are neighbors, but KL seemed a little older and dirtier to me.
We spent a total of $78.82 in Kuala Lumpur on the hop-on, hop-off tickets and food for the day. We didn’t have to spend all day in the airport and we got one more stamp in our passports!
-Cara