Kuala Lumpur Part One: Ghost Town for a Day

Kuala Lumpur is a city you hear a bit about from a fairly young age and therefore visit with a few expectations (unlike most of the rest of Malaysia, for us anyway).  The Petronas towers are in Sim City for pete sakes!  Because of our vision of KL as a bustling Asian hub city, we were startled to find downtown KL looking more like a ghost town when we arrived.  We shouldn't have been too startled, though, considering our strange expulsion from our long distance bus.  Our bus should have taken us from Kuala Terengganu directly into the center of KL (alas, not enough time to write about every wonderful Malaysian city on this blog--come over sometime with a bottle of wine or a few beers for KT details and other Malaysian stories left out of the blog...).  Instead, our driver (who was not the one we started with and who had been driving the bus for some time without our knowledge as we were on the top level) told us to get off on the side of  the highway.  We told him we would not get off the bus, but he insisted.  He pleaded with us in broken English, saying that the bus was not going into KL that day because of something to do with the police.  After several minutes we determined that he wasn't going to drive the bus any further with us on it.  Despite not knowing where we were and the fact that we were the only ones getting kicked off the bus we unloaded our luggage on the side of the highway in some KL suburb and prepared for our next leg.  A city bus pulled up behind where we were parked and our driver told us to get on it.  Uh. Okay (?).

We nervously boarded the city bus and rode it to a monorail station just outside the city center, and some distance from where we anticipated it would take us, judging from the sign in its front window.  But everyone got off the bus and went into the monorail station, so we followed.  By this point we probably should have figured that something unusual was going on, but we just shrugged at each other, puzzled, and made some comments about how unimpressed we were with KL public transportation.  At the ticketing window for the monorail (KL has an interconnected monorail, light rail, and elevated train system that is a city-wide pride and joy) we were told that the stop we needed to go to was closed.  We purchased tickets for the next closest open stop and headed up to the platform where more shrugging and defaming of the KL light rail system ensued. 

A Kiwi (also named Jeff) approached us and finally answered the question of why getting into downtown KL was so friggin' difficult.  Apparently we had just missed major protests and some minor rioting.  The Kiwi noted that the area we were headed to was directly in the middle of where it had all gone down.  He nodded toward Annette's T-shirt and noted  that yellow was the color of the protesters -- the same lot that was getting pepper-sprayed and thrown in jail.  Brilliant!  Beyond some extra walking, we made it to our hostel pretty easily after the monorail ride.  But the short journey from our final monorail stop and our hostel was an odd one. The streets were supposed to be filled with people and cars, alive with smells and sounds.  Instead, everything was quiet.  Dead.  The few people we did see were huddled in small groups, anxiously chatting and scanning the streets. We saw no cars other than a few police vans, complete with spent cops sitting on curbs with their heavy (and sweaty) looking riot gear resting next to them.

Once inside our hostel we began to get a more complete idea of the days events through various accounts of travelers and the two dudes who ran the the place.  The protesters and the riot police that assaulted them had battled directly in front of the hostel, so there were videos and photos galore of the action.  Two Argentinians in our dorm room had arrived earlier that day but were packing to leave on a train later that evening.  They said that they came down and out of the Petronas Towers right into the middle of the fray.  They were teargassed (as were several others staying in our hostel) and had to weave in and out of the chaos to get back to the hostel.  They stopped first at the train station and purchased the first night train ticket out of KL they could get."We didn't come to KL for this," they said. "If we wanted to get teargassed in a protest we could have just stayed home."

The next morning we learned from our ultra friendly, laid back, totally grooved out, party-animal hostel manager (also named Jeff!), that over 1,600 people were arrested the day before.  Jeff also told us that he had never seen anything else of the like in KL.  He noted that the Government usually acts quick to squash any protests and with the events of the preceding day he didn't foresee anything of the sort happening again for a long time.  He lamented the actions of his Government, and seemed to sympathize with the protesters, who were protesting for electoral reform.  There were brief clashes between red-wearing government supporters and yellow-clad protesters.  On the whole rioting was avoided, despite the word being tossed around a lot the day before. The KL protests made international news and, even more importantly, made for an exciting introduction for us to Malaysia's largest and most well-known city!