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Diary 9 - by Gavin Holcroft

We didn't manage too much sleep last night (well me and Hanna didn't) we finally fell asleep about 2am. Tehya didn't sleep much better as she stayed up until 11pm with the exciting prospect of flying.

We woke at 3am had a quick cold shower then carried the bags downstairs to be greeted by two deep sleeping Indonesian Lusa hotel staff members. We had arranged to get a lift with Wayan but were not sure which Wayan, as about five members of staff at the Lusa are called Wayan. I woke the Wayan I knew but it wasn't him, he phoned the Wayan who was meant to be waiting for us and we managed to leave the Lusa about 4:15am.

Kuala Lumpur

We got caught up in taxi traffic on Jalan Legian as 4am is roughly the drunkard leaving time for most of the bars in Kuta. After 10 minutes of getting nowhere Wayan decided to start beeping the horn constantly. It didn't help much but felt like something was being achieved. Eventually the taxis picked up the drunks and we headed off at break neck speed towards Denpasar Airport.

We arrived around 4:40am but still needed to get a print out from Air-Asia. We were delayed again by another drunkard but at least we were at the airport. Check-in went smoothly, we each had to pay a departure tax of 150,000 RP. We were only slightly delayed until 6:10am until we managed to take off. The flight was reasonably smooth and as good as you can expect from a budget airline with little room for stretching out.

Tehya managed to sleep again and only woke about 30 minutes before we landed. The flight arrived 28 minutes early to the joy of Hanna and me.

Our bags came out first on the conveyer. We collected them and set off to buy our tickets for the Aerobus/shuttlebus. It was a non stop service to KL Sentral near the exit of the LCCT building. This cost 8 RM each for me and Han and 4 RM for Tehya (about 拢3 in total).

Tehya meets a dinosaur!

There are buses that leave every 15 minutes and it took us around 1 hour to get to the centre of KL. We then walked across the road to catch the monorail. This cost 2.10 RM each for Hanna and me nothing for Tehya. It took about 15 minutes to get to our stop at Raja Chulan. We then walked across a few roads, through a few building and arrived at the Istana Hotel on Jalan Raja Chulan (we walked the long way around its only about 200 meters away). It was so simple to get here it was almost laughable.

I told the hotel reception our booking number and it then got a little complicated. They had no record of our reservation through Hotels.com (we got a great deal - two nights for the price of one) we spent the next hour trying to find out why they had no information of our hotel booking. The staff on reception were more than helpful but we were starting to get a little frustrated as all we wanted was a room as we'd had little sleep and a long morning of travelling.

Anyway we arrived at the hotel safely around 12:15 and relaxed with a few duty free G&T鈥檚.

Hanna and Tehya outside Petronas Towers

Our first day drifted by with no stresses or strains! We headed to the Petronas Twin Towers (we had a bizarre taxi ride with a rather sexist driver who tried to blag us by saying the towers were closed - and we should allow him to take us on a tour of KL).

We got there a little late, which meant our tickets for the tower visit were not until 4.00pm that afternoon. So we went to the Science Discovery Centre at the towers to kill some time. We went in at about 11.30am and did not come out until 3.15pm. We rushed the last few exhibits and could probably have been there for another hour without to much trouble. It was very interesting and we enjoyed a lot of what was on show. Tehya was a little young for lots of what was on offer but she still managed to have a great time too.

The Petronas Twin Towers building is spectacular and the bridge is very impressive. Personally I feel the buildings are much more beautiful from the outside and I preferred to look at the exterior structure than walk across the bridge.