No Tin-Horn Town Here

The flight went about as well as it probably could - I stayed up about four hours into the flight until I could no longer fight off the sleep, and got about four hours of good sleep. Unfortunately, six hours of flying still remained, and the remainder of the trip at best hit the light nap stage.

After a short layover at Kaohsuing Airport in Taiwan, I boarded the flight to Kuala Lumpur. Throughout the flight, I was reminded about the H1N1 pandemic that has many countries concerned as many people wore masks on the flight. A further reminder was given near landing time, when a health questionnaire was handed out along with the Malaysian arrival card form.

Passage through customs was a painless process (no visa was required for entry), so it was time to grab a taxi to get to my hotel. The first sense I got of the sauna that is Malaysian weather hit me as I walked out of the terminal to board my ride. This was a blanketing, almost overwhelming soup, but thankfully I only had to endure it for roughly a minute as we started the long (fifty mile) trip to around the Golden Triangle area of KL, whi

While the trip was somewhat leisurely, the time passed with rapid transitions. Almost immediately out of the terminal, the skies opened up with a passing thunderstorm, common for this time of year. Then, almost as quickly, the precipitation vanished, leaving me time to survey plant life which I had only seen on TV and movies prior. Then again, the vast suburbs and infrastructure of KL wended their way into my sights. The seeming sameness of what seemed to be vast housing developments made me even more anxious to catch sight of famous skyline of KL.

And sure enough, the city that started off as a tin prospecting camp in the Klang Valley peeked out from behind a hill crest, and it was not disappointing at all