Photos from this trip are here!
Except for a trip in August to see my folks in the USA we’ve been largely cooped up in Japan thanks to COVID restrictions. While Asia is still (even today) straining against those restrictions we felt like the time was right to get back on the road for some much needed R&R.
At first we hadn’t planned on going anywhere – just lock ourselves in our house with a lot of wine and gourmet foods and come out in January weighing a few more kilograms – but eventually the call of warm Southeast Asia was too much. We booked some cheap flights on Malaysian Airlines and left Japan on Christmas Eve.
We booked an early flight out from Kansai Airport and so that meant the first train on Saturday morning from Okubo. It was tricky to dress warmly for the morning but also to be ready for a couple of weeks of warm days near the equator. When we got to Sannomiya and had to wait for 10-15 minutes for the bus to the airport we were shivering in line. We splurged for two hot drinks from the vending machine to use as hand warmers until the bus came.
It was great to be back at Kansai Airport! It is always the departure point for our travel adventures and despite mostly being under construction (they tried to squeeze in a lot of renovation during the pandemic lull) it felt good to walk around and see how things were looking.
Check-in and security were a little busy but we made it to the gate with plenty of time to spare as usual, and then we were off just as the sun was rising. We booked two seats in the exit row, and so there was plenty of leg room for the 7 hour flight. Our meals were OK but nothing special – Kuniko ordered fish and got miso saba – which felt weird since we were leaving Japan.
During take off and landing we sat across from a flight attendant who was Japanese – she talked to us as we arrived and warned us of huge lines at immigration in Kuala Lumpur Airport. She was curious about us and asked about our lives in Japan. She made lots of smiley faces and nice comments and it was only later that we discovered that I had some spilled food on the front of my shirt. Such a cool guy!
Once we got into the airport it was a long trip to immigration. They had shut down some trams and so we had to ride a bus part of the way, and we certainly got some steps in that day. Despite what the flight attendant had said immigration was a ghost town and we flew right through.
After leaving immigration and customs the first thing we did was turn around and go back into the airport arrivals area to hit Din Tai Fung – a Taiwanese restaurant that serves consistently delicious salted egg lava buns. For some reason they are hard to find in Japan – even Din Tai Fung in Osaka doesn’t carry them – but I imagine they would go over really well. We can’t get enough and during this trip we stopped at this airport restaurant three times for salted egg lava buns and some noodles/wontons on the side.
We used the e-hailing app Grab and got a quick ride into the city. Using e-hailing apps has really changed how we feel about traveling (especially in SE Asia). Some of our best travel stories have been about crazy taxi rides or drivers ripping us off, and while they make good memories they are always stressful at the time. Now all that worry is gone. The apps we use set the price at the beginning, no cash changes hands, and we don’t need to try to explain the destination in another language. It’s almost too easy!
There were a few reasons why we chose Kuala Lumpur for our main destination this time: it was the last foreign city we had visited before COVID so it made a fitting bookend to the (hopefully) end of the pandemic. Also we had pretty much done all the sightseeing a few years ago so it was a place to relax and focus on food, and finally the familiarity of the city would make it that much more stress-free.
That sense of familiarity was a surprisingly positive emotion. I know that I felt a similar feeling in Cairo when we went back to the Al Doqi area of the city after staying somewhere else on our return from Luxor. Some places that should look foreign and unfamiliar are instead welcoming – you know how things work and where you can go to find what you need, in an otherwise unknown country. We got that same feeling this trip.
So we were eagerly looking around the center of Kuala Lumpur when we arrived. We wanted to see what things had changed in the three years since we (and COVID) had been there.
We stayed at one of the hotels that we used last time – it was in a great spot near a very popular street food destination, a huge shopping district, and an underground food court right next door that was our hangout for most mornings.
After dropping off our bags we went right outside and walked across the busy Bukit Bintang area, crossing the busy streets filled with tourists. It seemed like about 60% of people were masked, compared to Japan which still is about 99.5% masked.
We found Jalan Alor – a street food hotspot just five minutes walk from our hotel, and it looked almost exactly the way we left it in 2020. We even went to the end of the street and found the same satay cook, grilling up satay skewers of lamb, beef and chicken amid clouds of billowing smoke. We managed to find half a table and pushed aside some dirty dishes to eke out a space to enjoy. Drinking cold beer and satay with peanut sauce on a hot tropical night in Southeast Asia is a pretty good feeling.
While many things were familiar there were some things we noticed for the first time. I know that Malaysia is an Islamic country, but I didn’t really notice until this trip that the price of alcohol is quite high. Since there is little domestic demand the tourists are expected to pay more for the privilege of drinking, and so when we had drinks they were similar in price to back home in Japan or sometimes a little higher. We didn’t stop drinking while there, but it did cost more than I had expected. Kuniko discovered lychee martinis (and we bought the ingredients for them as soon as we got home), and I drank various beers, mostly Tiger. But it did give us the opportunity to drink the fruit juices that are available everywhere, blended and served in old-fashioned glasses.
Kuniko made sure that every hotel during this trip had a swimming pool, and I appreciated taking a dip almost every day. The poolside bar at the hotel had a “pool guy” who tried to get us to refill our drinks as much as possible – he was ripe with cologne and spent time with his smartphone until our drinks started getting low and then he was, “Hey boss, need another beer?” I can still smell the guy!
We spent almost every morning in the next door food court – a place we discovered on our previous trip. The main attraction (for me) was the Penang Secret Cafe, which served Penang’s (and Malaysia’s?) signature dish, char kway teow. It is made of rice noodles, shrimp, oysters, duck egg, shaved sweet Chinese sausages, and some mysterious (but mild) spices that make this dish magical. I went nuts for this dish last trip and it was just as good this time.
At the Penang Secret Cafe they fend off customers (even after opening time) until everything is just how they like it, and then they accept the first customer and a line forms. You pay, get a paper with a number, and then you need to stand back while the next person orders. The cooks throw the ingredients into a huge wok, and make the char kway teow two portions at a time. They put the completed dishes on a shelf with a matching number tag, and if your number matches you can take the dish back to your seat and dig in.
As it was a popular restaurant there were 5-6 people waiting around for their order, and I soon discovered that some guys (usually Chinese) would just take the first dish that matched their order and run off, whether the number was correct or not. That meant that I (and other rule-following people) would be standing around waiting for a number that already came up. You had to show your paper to the busy cook who would stop what he was doing, look around, shake his head, and then give you the next dish out of the wok. A very disorganized system.
We didn’t just eat char kway teow – there were so many dishes to try at the food court and each restaurant was in reality a special branch of another actual restaurant somewhere in Malaysia – so this place gathered some of the best food in the country in one place. We went heavily for noodles but there were plenty of other options, sweet and savory.
So we settled into a nice routine – wake up when we wake up, have some coffee, head over to the food court to try some new dishes around 10 am, come back to relax by the pool or read books, get out there for some lunch somewhere else, maybe another lunch, an early dinner, maybe another dinner… and so on. We were always keeping our eyes open for good food and coming back later when we were hungrier.
There were lots of good memories from this trip to KL: getting caught in the rain while eating dinner on Jalan Alor… every shop had table umbrellas ready to go up and even a unique system to prevent leaking between adjacent umbrellas. Enterprising locals showed up soon after selling plastic umbrellas – we bought one and managed to stop the rain moments later. I had a boba tea from Oja Tea, a newly opened shop that had exceptionally friendly staff. Just as we left the chubby owner and his family (all in regular clothes) came and conducted a surprise inspection while the poor staff tried to keep serving customers.
Our return to Chinatown was interesting – the shortcut that we used so many times when we were there last was gated up and I was glad we didn’t stay at the previous hotel – it would have made the walk to Chinatown much farther. The roti jalla was even better than I remembered the first time – with a rich soup and big chunks of meat. Most shops started to use QR code menus, which while somewhat annoying when you are in your own country, are quite useful when dealing with language barriers in another country.
After almost a week of eating well we were ready to move on to Ho Chi Minh City, so once again we went to the airport and ate some more salted egg lava buns at Din Tai Fung. While walking through the check-in area of Kuala Lumpur International Airport we came across a large group (200+?) of prisoners, being led in chains and handcuffs across the terminal area. It was a shock to see – I’ve never seen anything like it in a public place. The prisoners were dressed in regular clothes, and it was about 70% men and 30% women. My best guess was that they were being deported as illegal immigrants. We walked past one of the groups and they watched us just as much as we were watching them. It was a strange reminder that there are always people willing to take risks to find a better place no matter where you are.
While waiting to board the flight to Vietnam there were other groups walking around, and these people were not chained up. It seemed like they were going somewhere in China for work, and I wondered what kind of work it was that China was bringing in more people from developing countries to help with it.
Then we caught our afternoon flight out, and I’ll write more about our short visit to Ho Chi Minh City and the rest of our trip in the next entry.
