Two days in Kuala Lumpur

When you've spent the last few weeks shivering in a damp British winter, hitting the heat and humidity of the tropics is a bit of a shock to the system. But despite struggling a bit in the intense mugginess of Kuala Lumpur I thoroughly enjoyed my two days in this lively city.

KL reminded me a little of Singapore, although smaller, less tidy and well-organised, and arguably the nicer for it. The centre is reasonably walkable despite the heat and public transport is excellent. It's a very vibrant, multi-cultural sort of place with all sorts of people jostling along together.

I spent the first day wandering around the centre near my hotel and the second day visiting some of the main attractions.

First stop on day 1 was the Masjid Jamek, a small modern mosque quite close to my hotel which is built out into the river – an area they're clearly trying to regenerate and tidy up. The mosque was very pretty and peaceful. A nice Syrian guy told me a little about the main prayer hall but I mainly just wandered for a short while taking pictures and absorbing the atmosphere.

I tried to find the Masjid India next, but took a wrong turning and ended up somewhere else instead, so meandered down to the Central Market on the edge of Chinatown. Blissfully this was air-conditioned so although I had no desire to buy any of the stuff on offer – mainly handicrafts for tourists – it was nice to get out of the heat for a bit.

KL has a number of walking tours with route maps placed along the way so I followed the Chinatown walk past several Chinese temples loaded with gilt and pungent with incense, and into a Hindu temple which was bright with colour and figures of their gods.

I found a little restaurant buzzing with locals for lunch, where I had to enlist the waiter's help as there were no descriptions for any of the dishes and I'd only heard of a couple of them. I ended up with a plate of noodles fried with chicken and shrimp and egg, which with an iced coffee came to less than £3. Bargain!

The hub of KL's Chinatown is Petaling Street, a street which is now covered with a roof to enable market traders to ply their knockoff designer handbags and watches at all hours of the day and night. It's festooned with Chinese lanterns but it could be anywhere, and while it's interesting for people-watching it's not exactly selling high-quality wares. However there was a stall selling fruit so I got a vitamin boost with a bag of fresh pineapple!

After a short stop at the hotel for more water I continued my wandering, up the hill towards the KL Tower. This is one of the city's landmarks, one of those tall towers with an observation deck and revolving restaurant on the top. Surrounding it is an 'eco-park', a splodge of conserved rainforest with paths through it and a raised treetop canopy walk. There was a picture of a monkey on the website and I was hopeful of seeing some but in the event the only things I saw were a lot of trees and some biting insects. It was also even more humid under the canopy, so I cut the walk short and went to look at the tower instead. It seems to have a few restaurants and stuff, nothing of great interest; I exited through a chocolate-and-coffee shop which was absolutely mobbed by a vast Chinese tour group scrambling for bags of chocolate. I beat a hasty retreat.

Ate Indian for dinner – a vegetarian thali full of unusual and unidentifiable things, which was spicy but good. When I came out of the restaurant it was raining and it didn't stop raining for the following 36 hours (and was still raining when I left KL). I was a bit worried this would make my pre-booked trip up the Petronas Twin Towers a wash-out, but as it happened there was still a decent view.

The Petronas Towers are the other KL landmark everyone's seen. For a while they were the world's tallest building and are still the world's tallest twin towers, linked by the world's highest 'Skybridge' – although the bridge isn't really connected to the towers, so it can move when they sway in the wind. There's an efficient tour system going, where they sweep you in groups up various lifts; you get about 10 minutes on the Skybridge and 20 on the 86th floor observation deck, plus a pointless 10 minutes on the 83rd floor where they try and sell you the photos they've taken of you. Although the enforced time on the various levels was irritating it was worth going up there for the stupendous views of the city – I imagine they'd be even better on a clear day!

Next stop was the KL Bird Park, billed as the World's Largest Free-Flying Aviary. Like the bird park in Iguacu Falls, this means a lot of the birds get a massive space to fly around in although there were some in enclosed aviaries too, like the most gigantic hornbill. It was sheltered so the ongoing rain wasn't such a problem and I enjoyed going round looking at the various birds – there were also some monkeys climbing around on the outside of the aviary's netting.

I wanted to go to the national mosque but with time to kill stopped off at the Islamic Arts Museum, a beautiful building with Islamic domes filled with all sorts of art and artefacts relating to Islam. They had a huge collection of illuminated Qur'ans, armour, jewellery, clothes and ceramics from across the Islamic world and I spent a good couple of hours wandering around.

The Masjid Negara – literally, national mosque – was the final stop of a long day. I had to wait with the other tourists to go in, and then as at the Jamek mosque cover myself up in a lovely hooded robe (on balance, I prefer the hooded robe option to the headscarves and aprons which Orthodox churches in Russia and the CIS give you). On my way in a friendly gentleman said hello and a short while later waved me over to where he was starting what I thought would be a brief explanation of the mosque in the same way that the nice Syrian guy did at the Jamek mosque.

Oh how wrong I was. After a simple introduction of the prayer hall – how many people it holds, etc – we went on to the central tenets of Islam, why men and women must be separated at prayer, then on further to the way the Qur'an agrees with modern science on issues like the Big Bang. After about half an hour we got taken downstairs to a hot little room where at least there were chairs, in order for a multimedia presentation of science and Islam and verses of the Qur'an on an iPad. It was initially quite interesting but he kept talking and talking and talking. I was hungry and tired and too hot in my purple robe, which was made of some horrid synthetic material, and when we started getting on to why there isn't equal treatment of men and women and why this is for women's protection I made the excuse of needing fresh air and escaped.

Now I'm all for embracing other people's beliefs, and I like finding out about other people's culture. But it was the end of a long day, my blood sugar was dropping and after an hour of being talked at my tolerance levels had dipped to nothing. It was a shame as what I really wanted was to look at the mosque in a more leisurely fashion for 15 minutes and then head off to find some dinner. In the end I took a few rapid photos and got out of there, and my dinner was eaten too quickly as I was so hungry by the time it came. It was a slightly disappointing end to an otherwise good day.

Overall I'd recommend KL as a stop, and actually I'd like to visit more of Malaysia if I get a chance – it seems a beautiful country with friendly people and good food. So long as I can find a cooler time of year to do so!

Getting around Kuala Lumpur

KL was dead easy to navigate and public transport was excellent. I got the KL Ekspres train from the airport to the central station (KL Sentral) for RM55 return (about £10). Then I got the LRT (=metro) to my hotel. They have two-day transport passes including the Ekspres but it wouldn't have been economic, so I just bought single fares each time I used the LRT. It's incredibly cheap but the fares depend on how far you're going; you pay and get a token which is then used like a contactless/Oyster card at your departure station, and fed into the ticket gate at the arrival station to get out. If you change you seem to have to buy a new token, I couldn't work out a way to get a ticket all the way through when I changed from one line to another to go to the mosque/museum/bird park!