Posts Tagged ‘Kuala Lumpur’

We had a bit of a trip ahead of us to get from Borneo to Singapore.  Remember that thunderstorm which got us completely soaking wet after we saw the orangutans?  Well, it made for a very slow taxi ride to the airport and a fairly bumpy flight back to Kuala Lumpur.  It was 11 pm or so by the time we got in and we had to be on a train to Singapore early the next morning.

Justin did an awesome job planning this segment because he found us a hotel right by the airport, meaning we could get to bed right away and still be near transportation to the train station the next morning.  What he found was Tune hotels, which are a little different than normal hotels.  I don’t have any pictures, but I’ll try to describe it the best I can.  Or, just click on the link and look at their description.

Basically, it’s a hotel modeled after a budget airline.  So you get a really cheap, really tiny room, and anything else you might want has an extra cost associated with it.  The beds were some of the best we encountered in our travels, the shower was awesome, very clean, etc., but hardly enough space for us and our backpacks.  Especially since we had wet, muddy clothes we wanted to hang up from the jungle!  We didn’t need many of the add-ons.  In fact, we paid about 32 cents each, each direction, to get the shuttle from the airport to the hotel and about 65 cents to have a towel provided since we wanted to keep ours dry.  And that was it!

I’m not sure how a place like that would be for a longer stay, but for what we needed it was perfect.  I have never seen this concept anywhere else, but it looks from their website like they are an international chain. So who knows, maybe this will be the next big thing!

Beautiful KL

As I said in the last post, we each picked one thing to do before the year was over.  My pick was going to Borneo!  I had heard great things about the island, and after researching it a bit more, three things in particular stood out for me.  First, I wanted to see Kuala Lumpur – it is a really big city made famous by the twin Petronas towers.  Second, I wanted to scuba dive Sipadan, known as one of the finest sites in the world to dive, with sharks and turtles everywhere.  Third, the Kinabatangan River has loads of wildlife that is easily visible because of the palm oil plantations that are slowly removing all the jungle habitat around the river (only 1km on each side is protected).  These three things turned out to make a really great Malaysian adventure! (more…)