Where Size Matters
Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur's ultra-sleek international airport is the region's largest and one of the world's best. Outside the spotless, air-conditioned terminal you pick up a city-bus ticket from a well-signposted, well-ordered and well-run ticket counter – or you catch a taxi with a meter that works! – and you struggle to remind yourself that you are still in Asia.
The hour-long drive down a smooth highway, edged with manicured gardens and crowded with luxury 4x4s, bypasses the technological wonderland of Cyberjaya. This 'Multimedia Super Corridor' (about the size of Singapore) is Malaysia's answer to Silicon Valley and is one of the most spectacular testimonials to the way in which Kuala Lumpur sees itself in the new millennium.
By the time you catch sight of the gleaming twin spires of Petronas Towers, presiding over a skyline that has been described as the 'Manhattan of the East,' you are further than ever from understanding how this impressive metropolis could ever have deserved the name Kuala Lumpur (literally 'Muddy Estuary').
            Returning after a long absence – and fresh from much humbler Asian 'boondocks' – Malaysia’s newfound confidence struck me with a kind of reverse culture-shock. Everything works, shines, does what it is supposed to and does it on time. In short, KL clicks!
Not content with working to acquire the best, Kuala Lumpur also seems to be driven by an overwhelming ambition to have the biggest. The brochures at the tourist office were full of boasts that the city is home to the 'world's second tallest building'; 'the world's tallest flagpole'; 'Asia's second tallest telecommunications tower'; 'one of the world's largest freestanding sculptures'; 'the world's tallest minarets'; 'the world's largest religious dome.' In fact, half of the tourist office's floor space was taken up by a huge sculpture of the Shah Alam Blue Mosque. It was labelled 'The World's Largest Chocolate Sculpture'...and it was being preserved by what was probably the world's coldest office air-con system.
Whether you believe that 'big is beautiful' or not, it is hard to look up at the elegant spire of one of the Petronas Towers rocket-ships and deny that it is immensely beautiful. Until Taipei stole the thunder (with a monumental 101-storey tower, which the Malay press described as 'looking like a stack of gift boxes') this was the world’s tallest building…and KL has not one but two of them! Apart from being a mind-blowing engineering challenge and an awesome 'sculpture' in steel-and-glass, the Petronas Towers is the symbol of modern Malaysia’s obsession with Progress. The 'sky-bridge,' which connects the towers at the 42nd floor, offers a view over the broad, tree-lined avenues of KL's 'Golden Triangle' business district. Here you feel an entire world away from the plantations and jungle-clad hills of the 'untamed' Malaysia that looms on the horizon.
In this self-consciously modern business boomtown the betel-nut spit that speckles the pavements of other Asian cities is banned and even the whining tuk-tuk taxis have been exiled. The sacred banyan trees are now dwarfed by soaring glass, steel and marble skyscrapers that owe allegiance to Japanese minimalism, classic Malay or stark Western lines. Here Islamic motifs are found back-to-back with Chinese Feng Shui.
The karaoke bars that once offered the city’s only nightlife still exist but they have now been sidelined by a clubbing scene that is as dazzling as the nocturnal skyline of this Oriental Manhattan. But it is shopping that seems to have become the main activity of the growing privileged classes of KL. Anybody who thinks that Malaysia is suffering an economic slump should tour some of the chic shopping malls where, at weekends especially, people queue to play ATMs with all the compulsive addiction of slot-machine junkies.
Kuala Lumpur shop-aholics migrate to the air-conditioned malls in much the same way that the old colonials and plantation owners gratefully retreated to the cool of the hill-stations. These man-made micro-systems seem to compete to offer the closest semblance to a European winter chill. Drifting in off the balmy streets in shirt-sleeves you can soon get seriously cold. You wondered if the jacketed, thick-socked Malaysain shoppers are trying to convince themselves that they really are making their purchases in Paris or Milan.
Space-age monorails and the LRT (Light Rail Transit) now shuttle shoppers and commuters where once that famous 'muddy estuary' carried only jungle flotsam and a ragged collection of 'bumboat' traders. The area where the modest Klang River is joined by the (even more modest) Gombak River is where the British administration built their official buildings and played their polo. This is now fittingly known as Merdeka (Independence) Square but, until the skyscrapers usurped the limelight, the immaculately kept colonial buildings with their shiny copper domes were the quintessential KL icons.
Nevertheless, it is still the downtown areas that most visitors feel drawn to. If the Golden Triangle is brashly adolescent, then Chinatown and Little India could be described as wisely venerable. The original wet market, the miners' gambling dens and most of the brothels may have gone, but you soon discover that KL's downtown mood remains largely traditional. Many of the old shop-houses – now being revived in pastel-coloured coats – came of age when pioneering rubber planters were riding into town, and they were already middle-aged when KL became a tin-fever boomtown.
To catch some of this backwater, pioneering atmosphere you could not visit a more evocative place than the crumbling and decadent Coliseum Café & Hotel. It is affectionately known simply as 'the Coli' to the motley crowd of romantics, drifters and old-timers who prop up what is officially 'the highest bar in KL': within minutes of your arrival somebody is sure to explain to you that "this bar was ergonomically designed to match the height of the average Englishman's elbow!"
In the Coli's dining room Kapitan Chow, the octogenarian (some say immortal) Chinese waiter, ties starched bibs on the diners (to protect them from the sizzling hotplate steaks) with the same dignified airs that he once bestowed on visiting writers and diplomats. There are still rooms to rent upstairs but the management is clearly not used to renting them out to foreigners. While they might be mouldering and stuffy, they still seem to be impregnated with (among other things) the spirit of Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad.
Meanwhile, out there in China Town, the hustle and bustle continues much as it ever did. Chinese traders with string vests and abacuses still preside over 'go-down' stores that overflow with dried seafood and the unimaginable variety of fruits that are grown in this fertile country. The air is heavy with the scent of mysterious, often unappetising, ingredients that will nevertheless end up flavouring wonderful dishes. Behind the stalls of Petaling Street, stacked with 'same-same, cheap-cheap' fashion accessories, temple gates are perpetually clouded with burning incense. Rows of shop-houses carry signs that are at times intriguing ('Tubes, Rubs & Bras Trading Co') and at others deadly serious ('Fook-Hin Coffin Shop').
In Little India there are dozens of garishly decorated stores that are, almost without exception, called 'Palace of the Sari.' Bollywood stars beam at you from storefronts and the facades of Hindu temples are strung with ritual offerings and brightly coloured garlands. At the night-market the entrepreneurs of the world's largest overseas Indian community sell mobile phones (another national obsession), Hindi cassettes, bicycles, sacks of basmati rice and, of course, saris all from the same tiny stall.
The 'hawker centres' (food markets) of Little India and Chinatown still offer some of the best value food in the world and even the sleek Golden Triangle malls have tipped their hats to the old town by adopting this concept as the ideal way of dining in their upper-storey food centre. Eating is one of KL's big pleasures and, for once, the florid boasts of the tourist brochures ('the gourmet's paradise') ring true. As a pastime, eating has almost been elevated to a cult and is now an essential part of any visit to the city. In some of the largest food centres you could spend a year breathlessly working your way around Malay, Chinese, Bengali, Western, Tamil, Singaporean, Middle Eastern, Thai, Japanese stalls, and trying seafood, vegetarian, meat, noodles, rice, roasts, soups, stir-fries, pancakes...or the humble beef-burger. These food-centres are a sensory revolution and even when you have already eaten your fill they are worth browsing just for the sake of sight-seeing. Across an acre of clamouring tables you see the flash of a Malay satay grill, or an Indian cook spinning a frisbee of naan dough. An undercurrent of clicking chopsticks reminds you of the cicadas in the banished jungle. The spicy tang of tandoori, biryani, 'kari' and teriyaki hang over the dense vapours of Chinese steamboats and dim sums…while in one (usually remote) corner the drain-like stench of the durian fruit does its utmost to overpower them all.
Durian has been described as 'tasting like onion-flavoured custard' or 'like eating strawberry blancmange in a public toilet.' At first you don't quite know whether you are primarily tasting its sweet, sticky flesh or inhaling the stench of gutters that emanates from the core. If you persevere however it can become strangely addictive. It plays upon your senses and is, in the end, un-definable in much the same way as KL itself…but the sensations of the variety of this great city far outlast even the infamous aftertaste of the 'king of fruits.'
Most intriguing of all those 'World's Biggest' boasts – at least to a frustrated surfer in a country with several thousand miles of wave-less tropical coastline – was KL's wild claim to being home to a 'Big Wave Surf-spot!'
At Sunway Lagoon theme-park, under 'Asia's longest suspension bridge' and in the shadow of 'Asia's largest fibreglass volcano,' I surfed left-handers that peeled neatly across the 'world's largest wave-pool.' On the beach (made of 6,000 tonnes of relocated sand) pretty Malay girls sunbathed, and an African tom-tom band played under the swaying palm-trees. Afterwards, waving goodbye to the KL surf-team, I wandered off to find some après-surf munchies in the Zulu Walk food-centre, and found a bizarre choice of Cape Town Café, Zanzi Bar and Botswana Burgers. Sunway Lagoon is Malaysia's largest theme park and this fantasy land made up of everything African (but little that is purely Malay) is yet another manifestation of the capital's determination to re-create itself.
But then the brochures had, of course, warned me that I should be prepared for 'a world of contrasts' in the new Kuala Lumpur.

The End