Today I completed the second half of my hop-on-hop-off tour, which ventured beyond the city center into neighborhoods on the edges of Kuala Lumpur.
An aside: this is the first city I’ve visited where the hop-on-hop-off service isn’t run by the familiar Big Red Bus company. Instead, a local operator runs the show. The contrast was striking, and not in a good way. It makes me appreciate the Big Red Bus even more. The route today felt meandering, at times looping behind nondescript buildings rather than highlighting the city’s best views. Crowd management seemed improvised, with buses pulling away half full while passengers waited in confused lines. And instead of individual headsets available in multiple languages, commentary in English crackled intermittently over a garbled PA system. It was less a curated city tour and more urban endurance event.
That said, KL still revealed itself in flashes. We passed through Chinatown and Little India, neighborhoods humming with color and commerce, and drove by graceful colonial-era buildings left from British rule. The old railway station was immediately recognizable from my previous visit, its ornate façade a reminder of another era.
To add to the tour’s problems, traffic was relentless. There were times when we were at a near standstill in the thick of a traffic jam. I initially assumed holiday congestion, given Chinese New Year and the approach of Ramadan. However, it seems that traffic is always like this, no matter the time of year or time of day.
Before the circuit was complete, I “hopped” off the bus, found a cool and welcoming restaurant for lunch, then took a taxi back to my hotel. I spent a couple of hours in the adjacent park recuperating.