Kuala Lumpur's Hand

Saturday 27th February 2010, 7.30pm, Starbucks, Bukit Bintang - Kuala Lumpur

I was right. It's not a frequent occurrence but it does happen occasionally, I was right - I just needed someone to talk to. "Someone" came in the warm faced, joke cracking, intrepid adventurer form of Will, my Kuala Lumpur cohort. At breakfast in the hostel on Friday morning I was feeling mildly less angst ridden already, daylight and sunshine seem to blind eyes with which we saw night terrors so clearly only a few hours previous. Over toast and coffee I idly chatted away with some girls from the Phillipines who have been here for a few days, and asked them for their opinions as to what I should occupy myself with here.

Ear-wigging our conversation was Will, a native Bristolian who emigrated to Australia 3 years ago and is now a fully fledged Melbourne resident. He plonked himself down next to me and exclaimed, 'I just got here today, I'm on my own too. So Will and Grace, what are we gonna do?!'. The perfect mixture of West Country charm and Antipodean brashness, this one's a keeper I thought. This thought was confirmed only seconds later when he said, 'Let's not rush ourselves though. There's time for more coffee, a gossip and a fag on the roof, yeah?'. Someone saw me wide awake and panicked this morning, and someone sent me Will. Piecing together our limited knowledge of Kuala Lumpur we headed out on foot to explore this towering city of glass and steel, of skyscrapers and commerce - it's a high definition city on a cinema scope plasma screen.

You may have noticed from my dating and timing of this entry that I'm sat in a Starbucks as I write this. Avid blog followers will be well acquainted by now with my penchant for holing up in coffee shops, but I accept little blame for this misdemeanour this evening as it's pretty hard to avoid them here. I think I've counted about 7 Starbucks on my wanderings so far. My willpower may have walked me past 1, maybe even 3, but not 7; I took it as a sign. These 7 Starbucks quite accurately portray what kind of a city Kuala Lumpur is; it's London, just taller and hotter and with more "massage" parlours. It's unlike any place I've seen on my travels so far in that it's so current, so familiar, so bang up-to-date and on trend with everything you would expect from a modern Western city. It has the most ethnically diverse demographic of any city I've seen so far, largely due to the number of ex-pats living and working here. You can hardly blame them either, they have all the amenities of the developed world at their fingertips, food and drink are still a third of the price they are at home, and you're only a one hour plane journey away from the beaches of Thailand; beats an hour's drive from London to Southend doesn't it.

So what have we been doing in this modern metropolis? Well, pretty much what you would do in any Capital city I guess; shopping, eating, going to the top of tall buildings to look at the view, drinking beer on the street. (OK, maybe you wouldn't do that last one in London, but it would be defnitely be de rigueur in say, Swansea?). I must not detract from the splendour of the views though, this afternoon we went to the top of the KL Tower, some 335 metres in the sky, and saw below us a landscape of soaring concrete and industrialism. There are lots of facts and figures at the information centre in the Tower, proudly showing how it favourably compares in height to other world towers. You don't need the statistics when you're up there though, this tower looks down on buildings that when you were next to them on the ground gave you whiplash from staring up at them.

You know how when you're on a plane and about to land, everything looks like a Lego village, cars like motorised toys and people the invisible ants which operate them? Well that's how Kuala Lumpur makes you feel when you're standing in it, like a tiny little insect dwarfed by over-sized buildings. Everything here is on a giant scale (even my coffee looks a little bigger than a Grande at home), Will and I have been two little Lego people craning our necks to get our bearings. On our way to take photos of the illuminated Petronus Towers last night I suggested we consult a map. Will thought this hilarious and unnecessarily cautious given that 'it's not very likely we're going to lose them is it, we'll just look up and walk in a straight line towards those massive glowing blocks in the sky.' Point well made.

We've had a fun-filled, action-packed two days here together. We've been to a city zoo (where they fed a live chicken to a boa constrictor - probably not standard Animal Rights zoo practice), we've eaten spicy noodles in local kitchens that nearly blew our heads off, we've shopped for, as Will puts it, 'tacky Asian shit' in the Central Market, we've played arcade video games - turns out I'm much handier in a Formula One simulator than I am in an actual car, we've haggled our way through the stolen goods of Chinatown, and we've given hungry fish our aching feet to nibble on. I've done this before so was prepared, Will giggled like a schoolgirl. Two days here was enough though, enough time spent minimised like a Lego person drowning in commercialism, enough time to make a new friend.

When I was in Siem Reap in Cambodia, way back in mid-December, I bought myself a long silver chain. Since then I have purchased one pendant in every country I have visited and have been systematically adding them to my necklace and wearing it all the time as a talisman of my travelling experiences. It's gradually getting heavier, I'll probably look like Mr T. by the time I get to Australia, weighed down with bling from 11 countries. Each charm has been carefully chosen to carry symbolic reference for me with regards to where it represents - an elephant for Thailand, a star from Vietnam's Communist flag, a silver hoop, a 'tube' for Laos, and for Cambodia, a pendant in the shape of a teardrop filled with vines and flowers. I bought that one the day after I had spent an afternoon in the gardens of the Killing Fields. So what, I wondered, should I add to succinctly say 'Malaysia' to me in the future?

I searched a few jewellery shops and street stalls earlier this evening for a charm that would pass for a tower, Kuala Lumpur being a city so recognisable by it's high rise feats of engineering. But then I came across the pendant that now hangs rightfully from my neck, as soon as I saw it I knew it had to be this one. A small silver hand. Because this hand, Will's hand, has, more than anything, been what Kuala Lumpur has meant to me. No amount of sight-seeing, market dwelling, rooftop views or any other Asian city delights can compete with the fact that here, it was important for me to have a friend. Sometimes you know, where we are is insignificant, as long as there's another person's hand to hold when you need it.