This article first appeared in DIVERSIONS magazine

JUNE/JULY 2007

For many visitors, Kuala Lumpur (KL) is a transit city. Those heading for Malaysia’s white-sand beaches and diving hotspots usually don’t want to spend much time in the capital. Likewise, although Air Malaysia’s reasonable prices make KL a useful starting- or ending-point for those joining the South-East Asian trail, backpackers are typically either en route to somewhere else or – bodies exhausted, wallets empty – eager to fly home. This is a pity, as KL has much to offer, and merits its own place on the destinations list of any would-be explorer with itchy feet to scratch.

We arrived at night. Through the windows of a battered car belonging to the owner of our guesthouse, we caught glimpses of the hybrid, east-meets-west architecture surrounding historical Merdeka (Freedom) Square: British colonial-era administration buildings with high Moorish arches, minarets and mosques with European decoration. It was late, but we hadn’t eaten, so our host recommended a nearby Chinese restaurant; a no-frills outdoors affair – “hawker cuisine”, as KL locals describe it – with plastic chairs on the pavement, generators blaring to provide light and heat for cooking, and straight-talking but friendly staff squeezing between tables. We ordered black sauce noodles and the proprietor persuaded us to let her mix in some “vegetables” (presumably a generic term, for the dish contained pork, beef, chicken, squid, shrimp and, we think, liver). Some strange tastes, but they all washed down well enough with a cold beer.

The next morning we paid homage to the 455m-high Petronas Towers, hyper-modern skyscrapers that were, until recently, the tallest structures in the world. You can ascend to the observation deck on the 170m-high “skybridge” that joins the twin behemoths, but if it’s height you’re after, for about 15 Malaysian Ringgit (R30) you can climb to the observatory at the top of the nearby 310m Menar Telekom building. If you prefer to look up rather than down, there is a pleasant park at the foot of the Towers, where you can laze in the shade of palm trees and admire the sheer magnitude of these rocket-ship-shaped Babels.

The Towers are situated in the “Golden Triangle”, the most opulent section of KL, where there’s shopping, glitz and glamour for those with cash to spend. A few hundred metres away, this vivid twenty-first century scene degenerates into a haze of motorbike traffic and curious smells: incense, cooking spices, not-so-pleasant drain odours. In dirty and cluttered tenement buildings, washing hangs from lines looking like it has been there forever and will hang until the last washday in time. Even when it isn’t raining, water is constantly dripping through leaks, down stairs, over balconies. Hot, humid and tropical, KL is full of green, even in these grimy parts of town. Denizens hang around on street corners or sit smoking in open shop-fronts, watching the world go by, not in a rush to be anywhere in particular.

The contrasting run-down areas and upmarket spots blend together without too much difficulty in a South African imagination. In fact, the similarities to South Africa’s cities are numerous – partly because of this economic disparity, but also because of ethnic and racial heterogeneity. KL reflects the numerous cultural influences on the identity of modern Malaysia, and its inhabitants are consummate linguists, speaking English in addition to Malay, Mandarin and even Urdu, Tamil or Hindi. Indeed, there are also unexpected similarities in language, with certain Malay and Afrikaans words overlapping in both pronunciation and spelling; our two countries do, after all, share a history strongly linked to the intrepid Dutch and their ubiquitous (or iniquitous) East India Company.

Before the Europeans came to this part of the world, however, it was China that flexed its imperial power in Malaysia. Place names across KL hint at this legacy, not least among them Chow Kit. Once home to ladies and gents of ill repute, the area is now a night market that, ironically, is less Chinese than Malay and Indian. At first sight the market seems little more than a few narrow lanes of ramshackle stalls, but it snakes through the streets deep into the night. Apart from the usual mounds of cheap/fake jeans and watches and perfume, we also found some outlandish fresh produce stalls (chicken feet, pigs’ noses and the unbelievably bad-smelling durian fruit, amongst others). We went in search of Nasi-lemak, a popular curry with rice cooked in coconut milk, scoffing it down using a clumsy combination of our hands – the local style – and the plastic cutlery offered to foreigners.

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About 350km north-west of the capital lies the island of Penang. The scenery on the way out of KL reflects a long history of trade, represented by the massive plantations that produce rubber and palm oil, Malaysia’s two major exports; further north, the road is flanked by mangrove trees stretching to the coast. When the tsunami struck at the end of 2004, these plantations helped to absorb some of the impact of the rushing water. (Lying east of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, Malaysia was buffered from the worst of the tsunami and so was not as dramatically engulfed as its neighbours.)

Penang’s major hub is Georgetown, a place that – irrespective of natural disasters – gives one the impression that it’s collapsing. It seems, literally, to be falling apart, but visitors fall in love with the double-story delight of its buildings. Some are brightly painted and restored; some ooze faded elegance through their dusty but intricate decoration; some are crumbling, broken, with the haunting beauty of decay. Their inhabitants are a fascinating mix, the city itself an anachronistic, marginal version of Kuala Lumpur’s Malay-Chinese-Indian melting pot. This racial integration is all the more remarkable because the different cultures remain palpable and distinct. Within a 100m radius you can find a Muslim mosque, a Hindu temple, a Buddhist temple; walk a bit further and you’ll see a Christian church. Penang’s colonial past is evident in scores of eroded, palm-fringed mansions. Nevertheless, the legacy of the trader-bureaucrats who pioneered the British settlement in Penang is neither as tangible nor as vital as that of the Nyonya, or Chinese-Malay, and Indian immigrants, whose food, language and religion are a dizzying combination.

Equally dizzying, as in KL, is the mayhem on the roads, the pollution and the dirt. This can, however, be escaped, and one needn’t traverse the island to do so; certainly, the beaches on the western shore are appealing, but if your time is limited, make the half-hour journey from Georgetown to Kek Lok Si temple at the foot of Penang Hill. Kek Lok Si is an impressive complex, a combination of incongruous architectural styles on multiple levels: broken perpendiculars, sharp angles, graceful arches and curved walls, all splashed with pastel shades. The temple boasts a Chinese-Thai-Burmese pagoda and a huge standing female Buddha which, at 210 feet, is apparently the tallest of these unusual figures in the world. We were there towards the end of the day, and as the sun set over Georgetown below us, a dour elderly monk (glasses and shaven head perfecting a kind of Natural Born Killers menace) tut-tutted us away. The view from the summit of Penang Hill at dusk is, apparently, spectacular – but the light was fading, the funicular railway was closed, and we’d left it too late for the three-hour hike to the top. Disappointed, we turned back towards Georgetown; we were leaving the next day. Ah well. They say you should always have a reason to go back.