Kate and Pat Sleigh the Holidays

At breakfast the kids were keen to give a present to their chef friend, Aidan. They'd decided on one of the reindeer antler key rings that we got in Finland. Aidan was very excited by the gift and said he'd make the kids a very special Indian themed breakfast this morning. He arrived at the table a bit later with two plates filled with delicious smelling curry and roti. The kids enjoyed most of it and finished off breakfast with ice cream, because apparently that's now what we do after breakfast.

The kids wanted one more swim before we had to pack and check out of the hotel, so we took them to the pool after breakfast. We then went back to the room and started the worst part of any holiday: getting ready to go home. Fortunately, we still had most of the day at our disposal, so once we finished packing, we stashed the bags at reception and set out for our final adventure in KL.

It's embarrassing that it took us this long to discover the air conditioned tunnels, but now that we knew about them, we designed our walking routes to maximise the amount of time away from the hot and humid weather. We only had a short walk from the hotel until we found the tunnel entrance which took all the way to KLCC. This is clearly the way to travel if you're in this tourist zone.

We had a Malaysian lunch at a nice restaurant in the Petronas Towers/KLCC before heading to the Petrosains Science Discovery Centre. Having a science centre sponsored by a giant oil company felt a bit like a conflict of interest, and it certainly delivered on some amusing experiences inside. For example, the kids learnt how to dig for coal using an excavator, about how dinosaurs became oil, and while there was a good amount about pollution/global warming, there was also a lot of bias (e.g. Plastic isn't so bad! Carbon capture is great, we just need to dig for gas to free up space!). There was also a full size replica of the deck of an oil rig.

Kate and the girls spent quite a lot of time playing a game on a large tabletop display where you can create stars and planets. The physics engine of the game simulated what happened when two stars got to close together and collided, or what would happen to a planet orbiting a star if it was too close (hot burnies), just right (an Earth-like world creates and sustains life until life ends up destroying itself in a nuclear disaster), or too far away (ice planet). The girls spent their time with a little boy tossing a bunch of stars together which ended up creating a massive black hole and in doing so destroying the universe. So much for the solar systems I was trying to build.

On the way out, one of the final exhibits spoke about the impacts of climate change. Poor Margot had a moment of realisation that the changes will happen in her lifetime and had a mini mental breakdown. Violet had also not realised, but was easily distracted by a giant slide. Two very different children.

Violet had a rough experience later when she was playing a 'speed throwing' game. After waiting an age for her turn, a very assertive boy came, told her to give him the ball, and took over. No one knew if there was an appropriate way to correct him in this Islamic country, so we just had a chat with her about expressing her needs; telling people she needs a bit longer, or maybe throwing the ball at their head.

Perhaps the best part of the centre was a game designed to test your reaction time. You had to stand on a specific spot while several batons were hanging from a curved rail over your head. Once you started the game, the batons were randomly released at different intervals and you had to try and grab them before they hit the ground. Most people stood still and thrust their arms this way and that grabbing at the batons when they fell, but we watched a young girl absolutely putting her life on the line trying to catch the batons. She literally threw herself to the ground, diving and lunging after each baton as they fell. Her family was clearly concerned she was going to hurt herself, but curiously did nothing to discourage or stop her. I can't remember if she caught any, but I can tell you that that girl is going to run the world one day.

Back to the hotel to collect our bags and into our final Grab to the airport. We'd been lucky this whole time and all our cars have had seatbelts. But this one was missing the middle seatbelt in the back for Kate. And unluckly for Kate, this was probably one of the worst, most aggressive drivers we've had this trip. Speeding, tailgating, leaving his indicator on for 10 minutes until the point he wanted to change lanes, then mysteriously turning it off just before merging, driving on the shoulder to pass cars, waiting until the absolute last minute to swerve through several lanes to make the exit from the highway, all in pouring rain and rush hour traffic.

In case I die - love you all. (spoiler: she didn't die. She's right here next to me practicing French on her phone).

And with that, we arrived at the airport where KLIA tried (unsuccessfully) to gaslight us into thinking the airport is really close to the city with massive murals quoting people who used to say things like "it used to take 1:30 to get to the airport, now it's only 45 minutes!". Really, it was a pretty long and dreadful drive (our psycho driver aside). We've clearly been spoiled by how close Canberra airport is (and even how close Sydney airport is to the CBD).

We asked the kids for their highlights and take aways from the trip.

Margot

• Kidzania
• Ice cream for breakfast in Kuala Lumpur
• Santa
• Lego Discovery Centre
• Learning if you pat a dog statues nose you'll get good luck

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Violet

• Finding Santa
• Kidzania
• Lego Discovery Centre
• Giant bookshops in Belgium
• Ice skating in Amsterdam
• She says she learned Belgium isn't that fun when there are no kids to play with

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The girls were very pleased to wake up this morning to a special breakfast custom made by their baker friend Aiden and served on a plate shaped like a teddy bear. They continued with their new morning routine of saying hello to the koi in the pond next to the restaurant until the mozzies realised their breakfast had arrived and descended.

A few people had recommended we check out the KL Bird Park while we're in town. It was advertised as the second biggest walk in aviary in the world, although looking it up later this is apparently (like all claims to being the biggest anything) a contentious topic. Do you measure it by ground area, or by height, do you include areas that aren't netted, does the number of birds or bird species come into it, etc. In any case, we trust it's pretty big. We grabbed a Grab there, bought our tickets, and headed in.

Towards one end of the park we came across a group of monkeys, who clearly weren’t welcome in the bird park, but no one could be bothered to move them along and fix the holes in the aviary netting. They were absconding with fruit left on platters for the birds, and enjoying swinging around after finding that expert landscape design for birds also suits monkeys quite well.

Mostly we saw happy birds flying around, stretching out in the sun, or swimming in the watering holes, but there were still lots of small enclosures for some of the birds, and ropes around the legs of the birds of prey to keep them from flying off. The owls were roped to little stands directly in the sun, and while they were trying their best to sleep they were not looking terribly happy. A Google search afterwards suggests there used to be a cage with 10 hawks crammed in, now there's just the one sad fellow tied to a perch. An improvement, but maybe this isn't a suitable place for those kinds of birds at all?

We were also a little perplexed and sad in the parrot enclosure. While the lorikeets and rosellas were allowed free reign with some of their African and South East Asian cousins, the cockatoo and galah were kept in solitary confinement in tiny boxes and looked quite miserable. Sulphur Crested Cockatoos are apparently “interesting” here, not garden destroying assholes like they are in Australia. We know cockatoos are absolute terrorists, but I'm not convinced they need to be kept in cells. There was one large talking parrot who said "hello" to the girls about 30 times, much to their delight, but it all seemed rather depressing to the adults. We finished up our mixed visit with a mostly inedible lunch at the attached cafe.

It was getting hot, but we decided to walk to the touristy colonial bit of the city and China Town as it was less than 2km away. We passed the Islamic Arts museum, which looked very interesting, but no one was dressed appropriately to go in. We also walked passed the enormous National Mosque of Malaysia, but again, no visit due to inappropriate dress. We carried on with our increasingly hot and sweaty walk until we got to Independence Square, an area full of colonial buildings where the Malayasia flag was first raised in independence from British rule. It was absolutely ridiculously hot, so we didn’t spend as long here as we had planned, nor did we make it to China town.

It was interesting reading a little about colonialism in Malayasia though. We hadn’t realised it didn’t really exist as a cohesive country until the Dutch and British decided to stop fighting each other (to focus on fighting the French), drew a line on a map and agreed everything to the north of the line was Malayasia and British, and everything to the south was now Indonesia and Dutch. It's baffling to think about how many countries have been created by Europeans scrawling lines on a map to divide up land they probably have never actually been to. At least it was for a cause that we can all rally behind: fighting the French.

Caught another Grab to head back home for a much needed swim to cool off. For dinner, we decided to head back to Pavilion since there was more than enough choices to keep everyone happy. For their last dinner in KL, the kids wanted a traditional Malaysian dinner of Pizza Hut. Sigh.

Today we had one activity planned - visiting Kidzania. Kidzania is a mini-city kids’ theme park with 30 parks around the world. We don’t have any in Australia, and we were keen to give it a try in KL.

We arrived at an Air Asia check in desk, which really confused the girls after all the flights we’ve done lately. “Where are we going now?”, “I thought we were staying in Malaysia”. After ‘checking in’ (showing our tickets) we were sent up a series of escalators to ‘security’ (where facial recognition confirmed we matched the selfies we had to submit to get tickets) and ‘immigration’. All of this took place below the cut up and mounted body of a seemingly real Air Asia plane.

Once inside, the kids were issued passports as new citizens of Kidzania, given a stack of starter KidZos cash, and told to go wild. The centre is like intro to capitalism for kids. Inside there were 2 stories of streets and stores. Some shops the kids could ‘work in’ to earn a KidZos wage (the pay was lower for unskilled labour, higher for professionals), some places they could spend their KidZos on activities or toys, and some you could spend real money on things like lunch. All of the stores were sponsored by real businesses. We’d heard some of the more popular activities book out, and to get a slot as soon as you arrive. The kids had ants in their pants while we locked in sessions with the Police, Tealive, Firefighters, Airline Pilot and Paramedics for later in the day.

It’s seriously too much to go through every activity the kids tried, and they probably only tried half of the activities on offer. Highlights for the kids were:

• Making bubble tea (which they tossed out because they thought the bubbles and tea were gross)
• Running around like crazy things delivering packages to the shops as posties (Margot did this activity three times)
• Making (and eating) sushi and A&W Burgers
• Operating a toll booth in the area where other kids were driving little electric cars around a track
• Working as hotel cleaners tidying up a messy room
• Margot loved being an airline pilot, Violet hated the flight simulator
• ‘Smoothie shop’, which was mostly riding stationary bikes at high speed to operate blenders and mix smoothies

Margot said she loved being a dentist, but I wonder if she just said that to make me happy?

In an astounding coincidence, we ran into Cody, Mrs Foong's husband at Kidzania who was there with his two kids while Mrs Foong enjoyed some retail therapy at the shopping center across the road. Hard to believe that a) we met them on the plane on our first flight out of Australia to Malaysia and b) that we'd run into them again in Malaysia 3 weeks later at a random activity! Margot is going to have fun reminiscing with Mrs Foong about it when school starts.

One of the funniest activities to watch as a parent was working at the Famous Amos Cookies stand. They put on their gloves, hairnets and aprons and rolled out three cookies on their baking trays. The instructor put all the trays into what looked like an oven from the kids' side. From our perspective we could see it was hollow. The man stood in the hollow tipping the dough from the trays into a bin, then popped back into the kids' view with sealed plastic packages of 3 cookies for each kid. 'Here are the cookies you baked!' Violet noticed hers were stale, but didn't click that it might indicate they weren't fresh out of the oven.

Overall, the activities were a bit hit and miss. Some of them were great and well thought out, but some needed more purpose. In particular, the Police activity was total rubbish and we don't understand why it books out. It consisted of the kids arriving, chucking on uniforms, getting on a golf cart with lights on the top, driving to a fake fire and standing hand in hand keeping the area clear while the firefighters spray water all over the building to extinguish the fire. I guess the ride in the little golf cart could be fun? But we felt it was a missed opportunity to do something like thwart a bank robbery, or follow some clues to track down a criminal and thrown them in prison.

One that was really well done was the process the kids had to go through in order to drive the little electric cars around the streets. In order to get her drivers licence, Violet had to make a trip to the optometrist and have an eye test done (the optometrist was also a job the kids could do). They then had to take their successful eye test and take it to a driver's training centre where they had arcade style driving games set up to teach the kids basics of driving (go, stop, speed limits, etc). While the instructions to the game weren't very well communicated (Violet "failed", which nearly brought her to tears until she realised that really, everyone passed and she would still be able to drive the little cars), the idea was very clever. At the end she was given a drivers licence which she could present at the track and hop into one of the electric cars to zoom (really, potter) around the track only to be stopped by whichever kid was currently on a power trip operating the toll booth boom gate.

A major disappointment for Violet was saving KidZos to do the indoor rock climbing activity, but being told (very nicely) she wasn't allowed to climb in a skirt unless she had shorts to put underneath. Boo modesty.

The biggest curiosity for the girls was found in the bathrooms where half of the stalls were occupied by porcelain squat toilets. The girls could not grasp how it could possibly work. Another toilet observation was bidets everywhere in every toilet (at Kidzania and in other places). These seemed to be abused by some patrons with water sprayed up the walls and on the back of the doors.

We stayed until closing time, and by then the kids were utterly exhausted. Both girls slept on the ride to dinner with Kate in the middle back seat holding their heads up. The drive that had taken less than 20 minutes in the morning took over an hour in peak KL traffic. We had dinner at Din Tai Fung - delicious as always plus bonus cute panda desert dumplings.

Dinner made us think about the prices in KL and how seemingly random they are. Things like clothing and cosmetics more expensive than in Australia, but a massive dinner for 4 at very nice restaurant was only $80 AUD. A meal at Burger King was the equivalent of $4 AUD, but Five Guys was more than $20 (not that we ate at either). Their equivalent of Uber (Grab) was insanely cheap, petrol was cheap, but going against the grain in SE Asia, their beer is very expensive! $17 AUD for a beer in the hotel. Granted that's inflated hotel prices, but still way more than you'd expect to pay anywhere in Australia. Even buying a bottle at the supermarket was approximately on par with Australia. Maybe the Islamic cultural influence has had an impact on alcohol pricing to try and discourage it? The end result of it all was we spent the week not drinking, which on reflection is probably a good thing to help us get over jet lag and sleep better. Good decisions are so boring.

Kate was a keen bean this morning and wanted to get ready fast so we could get to the Batu Caves before it got too hot and too busy. Unfortunately, “fast” didn’t appear to be in Pat’s or the girls’ vocabulary this morning, so despite getting up at 7, we didn’t leave the hotel in our Grab (Malaysia’s version of Uber) until around 9.

Lucky for Kate, the driver was on her side and he absolutely gunned it to the cave. The predicted 28 min drive took half that. Just like that we’re back on track! Well, not really, because it’s already stinking hot and there are already quite a few people here, but back in the right direction.

The Batu Caves are massive cathedral like limestone caves to the north of KL. They were used as shelter by the indigenous people, then as a guano farm by the Chinese, then were officially 'discovered' (i.e. noticed by a white man) in 1878 by an American naturalist. Shortly after this, they were converted into a Hindu temple. They're the focal site for a Hindu festival in Feburary, Thaipusam, where thousands of worshippers walk barefoot from KL City Centre to the temple carrying milk to be greeted by the enormous statue of the Hindu God of war, Lord Murugan.

The first thing we noticed on getting out of the car were all the monkeys! A friend of ours in Canberra was just bitten by a money in Zimbabwe, so we were even more vigilant than normal when it came to cheeky wild animals. We told the kids to make sure they kept their distance and didn’t offer (or appear to offer) the monkeys any food. They asked why there were so many monkeys around and we explained it’s likely because people feed them, which isn’t very good for the monkeys. Sure enough, we walked past quite a few people handing out bananas or coconuts to the monkeys who grabbed the food and scarpered off to eat their loot as more monkeys noticed and chased them/mobbed the people who had the food.

The statue of Lord Murugan was definitely imposing, towering 40 meters over us, and the stairs next to him leading to the caves were actually as bright as the photos we’d seen - it’s not just filters! Apparently the rainbow makeover was cooked up in 2018 by the temple management committee, but not actually approved by the government and not really legal at a heritage site. But it’s got the Instagram tourists visiting, so I guess the influencer dollar overpowered any motivation to reverse it.

Much to Kate’s delight, there were also chickens pottering around. Distressingly, there were a couple of them pecking at styrofoam boxes and eating the bits they were able to pull off. Mmmmmm, microplastics. Delicious.

The walk up the 278 rainbow steps was a piece of cake for the kids. Online blogs said it was doable with kids, but plan to stop and rest regularly. Margot basically dragged us up the steps, complaining audibly every time we stopped for a photo.

Pat and the kids took their shoes off and went into one of the smaller temples at the top. There was a kiosk in front selling tickets and various other things (candles and incense perhaps?). But there didn’t seem to be anything stopping us from going up for a closer look. One of the temple priests saw that we looked a bit lost and motioned for us to come over. He gave each of the girls a small flower and put a tilaka dot on everyone’s forehead using a special ash paste.

To get into the largest temple you walked through an archway down a path towards a shrine. There was a crowd gathered around a small fire with a pot of liquid set over it. People (presumably Hindus based on their dress, dots, and involvement in the ceremony) were recording videos with phones. We stood around for a while to watch and see what might happen, but we eventually gave up and started back down the rainbow stairs. Perhaps we should have hung out a little longer, because a few minutes later there was some loud music that started playing. Perhaps the liquid started to boil and that was significant? Will need to do some reading and see if we’re able to learn more about the ceremonies there.

We passed a number of smaller rainbow temples and statues on the walk back to the Grab pick up location which were also really beautiful and a nice surprise. The massive imposing limestone cliffs were an interesting contrast to the dense city built almost to their base.

We had thought we’d use the remainder of the day to go to Sunway Lagoon, a water theme park a half hour from the hotel. Back at the hotel, Kate discovered it's closed today. On investigating alternatives, it became apparent there are all kinds of modesty dress rules for swimming in Malayasia. It seems you’re basically meant to swim fully clothed if you're a woman. Rashies are not accepted in many places because they’re not made of the preferred material. As Kate, Violet and Margot don’t have the right clothes, we had to break it to the girls we wouldn’t be able to go to the waterpark after all. They took it well, but only after a promise Kate would stop being precious about water temperatures and jump in the hotel pool this afternoon.

We walked to Pavilion mall for lunch as recommended by our friend Gavin who has family in Malayasia and visits often. This hawker centre was much cleaner looking than the one from last night’s dinner. More ramen for Margot, Chinese dumplings for Vi, shallot pancakes and Wonton Mee (dumpling soup) for Kate and Pat. All delicious - would recommend. Vi was very interested in a man making pulled noodled by hand, stretching out dough repeatedly until it made delightfully satisfying long strands which went straight into the water to cook.

On the walk back to the hotel we discovered an air conditioned walkways over the street level. This is the way to travel if you’re a pedestrian. Eventually the gravy train ended and we had to turn and exit the walkway back to street level to make it back to the hotel.

Walking through the lobby, Pat spotted some pilots arriving at the hotel and pointed them out to Margot and asked if she wanted to meet them. She did, but only if dad came along and made the introductions. They were incredibly friendly and offered Margot and Vi their hats for a photo op. Pretty sure they said they were from Saudia Airlines and had arrived from Jeddah for a couple days before flying back home.

While we cooled off the kids played with lego in the room, now half the figures were Gods and the other half were worshipping them in temples.

We finished the day with literally hours in the pool (honestly, where do the kids store the energy for this)! Even Kate was in for an hour or so playing post office and pets, but she does not have the stamina of those girls!

Our last morning in Belgium was spent packing, cleaning, and eating waffles. Kate's was very cold and dry and may have been a leftover from yesterday, but the other three were delicious.

Then it was the tram to the Eurostar station, the Eurostar train to Schiphol Airport, a flight Schiphol to Abu Dhabi, another flight Abu Dhabi to Kuala Lumpur, a private transfer from the airport to the Shangri La, and bed.

When we woke up, it was the 13th of January. The 12th was lost to transit and time zones.

A few quick things of note from the transit.

• A surprisingly unsurprising number of women in full burqas in the Abu Dhabi airport, only their beautifully mascara-ed eyes visible.

• A death threat on landing in Kuala Lumpur. “Welcome to Kuala Lumpur where the local time is 7:55pm. If you bring drugs into Malaysia there’s a mandatory death sentence if we catch you”. Having boarded the plane in a city where they sell joints and weed brownies in souvenir shops, that information felt like it would be more useful to people before boarding, not on arrival.

• We organised the airport transfer months ago with the Shangri La for 3 times the cost of a normal taxi to ensure we had a) booster seats for the one hour drive into town and b) zero dramas at the airport having to deal with dodgy taxi drivers. The van came equipped with two baby capsules (suitable for an 18 month old, max) and our driver disappeared for about 20 minutes after meeting us when we took the kids for a wee before leaving the terminal. Sigh.

We started the first full day in Malayasia at the included Shangri La breakfast buffet. An extensive spread as expected! American, European, Chinese, Indian, Malay and bakery options PLUS two chocolate fountains and an ice-cream station in case you need a sugar hit on waking. The only issue was our uncertainty about food hygiene - can we eat cut fruit? Is the pizza buffet full of salmonella from sitting under a heat lamp since 6am? We were conservative and pretty careful about what we ate. Meanwhile Violet and Margot made friends with one of the servers who worked at the bakery.

After breakfast we walked into the KLCC mall near the Petronas Twin Towers to look for a new sleep clock for the girls after the existing one broke in Brussels. Tried 5 different shops getting increasingly stressed with the people and lights and noise and endless consumerism in all the shops. When the fire alarm started going off and the mass of crowds continued to walk calmly around like that screaming is a normal background noise all the time we gave up and called it a fail.

As we left to go to the big central park next door, Violet realised she didn't have the special kid camera she'd been given for Christmas. After a little thought she remembered she might have put it down in the first shop we visited when she was playing with the Lego display. We traipsed unwillingly back into the mall. Amazingly, the camera was behind the counter at the shop, with a picture of a hand doing a peace sign added to the roll.

Malls are hell on earth.

Back to the central park, we enjoyed a nice wander through the trees with no shops, artificial lighting or fire alarms. We came upon a closed splash park, and a massive playground which appeared to be a graveyard for mid-sized plastic play equipment; replicas of similar slide/bridge/monkey bar combos over and over as far as the eye could see. The girls tired of it fairly quickly, and we went back to the hotel.

We noticed almost immediately on leaving the hotel this morning that this place is not designed for pedestrians. The footpaths randomly end in a busy road or brick wall. There are minimal protected crossings, but unlike other places in South East Asia it isn't acceptable to just walk across when there's a gap in traffic. The few protected crossings let every combination of traffic go, then all pedestrians have a green light long enough to cross only if you are Usain Bolt. Good luck if you're elderly or disabled!

We did make it back unscathed and had a swim at the hotel to cool down.

We ventured out for dinner, walking through lively streets with a multicultural crowd, huge advertising signs, people dressed as animals, and couples filming dances for TikTok.

We were heading to a hawker centre, which is like a food court with the same stalls you'd see selling street food in a night market, but with running water so possibly better ability to clean utensils etc? Malaysia has a massive range of food due to local influences of the Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures, plus colonial influences from the Dutch, English and Portugese, plus recent migration from all over Asia. There's plenty of interesting fusion foods to try. The centre we went to was called Lot 10, and apparently had chosen their favorites from the local street market to set up semi permanent stalls. The mall is also known for its quality Japanese fare. We finished the night with a range of dumplings (which Vi loved), and two big bowls of ramen (which went down well with Margot).

This is the girls' first time in Asia, and they made some observations today about the differences between here and Europe:

• More traffic
• More motorcycles
• More trees ('Why doesn't Australia have this many?' ponders Violet)
• More fountains
• Bad footpaths ('but you forget because of all the trees, like in Fiji' said Violet)
• More balloon animals (this is what Margot calls people dressed as animals)
• More signs everywhere ('Ads, flashing signs, street signs - all the signs' clarifies Margot)
• More tall buildings
• More malls and shops
• Lots of women in headscarves ('What's the thing on their heads called? It's beautiful' opines Violet)