General tips

Kuala Lumpur is an important hub for international air traffic. There's quite a few airlines that travel to South East Asia and use Kuala Lumpur as a transfer airport. Unfortunately transfer times can be quite long, with 6-8 hours not being an exception.

I've already taken this opportunity to head for the city of Kuala Lumpur twice. Kuala Lumpur has enough to offer to keep you busy for a day and it certainly beats hanging around at the airport. You don't need a visum to go into the city for a day and there's a direct train service into the town. The taxi drivers at the station will be more than willing to show you around the city's highlights in a couple of hours. Below is part of my travel journal describing the city tour we did in 2005.

We decided to take the KL Express to the centre of Kuala Lumpur. An unexpectedly nice last day of our vacation followed. At the Central train station we decided to take a taxi to one of the big shopping malls of Kuala Lumpur; Suria Shopping Centre, which was located at the foot of the famous 452 meter high Petronas twin towers. When approaching a taxi driver, Mazlan, he offered to escort us through some highlights of the town for the rest of the afternoon. For 40 dollars he drove us to the shopping centre, the Menara radio tower, Chinatown and back to the station. This might have been overprized but with six people splitting the amount we weren't complaining ...

Suria Shopping Centre turned out to be one of those huge shopping malls, six stories high. Most of the merchandise was designer clothing, which of course was of high interest to the ladies in our small group. After doing much looking and little buying we walked outside where Mazlan was already waiting for us.
Next up was the Menara radio tower, 421 meters high and offering a great view over the city. After buying tickets and being shot up to enormous heights we were given audio sets for a 'do it yourself' audio tour. Quite a nice added value to the magnificent panorama's over Kuala Lumpur. We had arrived at the right time since the sun was setting, which resulted in some beautiful orange clouds.

Back at the base of the tower Mazlan took us to Chinatown, where streets were filled with countless stands of merchandise. As a matter of fact, you could easily call it 'replica heaven' since the legal nature of all products was highly questionable. After some searching we found a nice restaurant in one of the streets. It proved to be managed by a Chinese dude who had worked in Amsterdam for a while and actually new some Dutch lines. Some fine food and a couple of Tiger beers later we headed for the spot where Mazlan would pick us up and he was faithfully waiting for us to take us back to the train station.