Welcome back to another episode, this time coming from you live from Batumi, Georgia (so far so good here, it's a chilly 3C but with some Russian vodka and Georgian wine life is good). After one month in Malaysia it's time for another location review. Less in-depth than Vietnam given the shorter duration of my stay, but still hopefully enough to give you a good idea of what life is like on the ground in the hottest and most humid place I have ever been.
If Vietnam is not walkable, then Malaysia is absolutely not walkable. If you drive or you've travelled in the USA/other car-centric societies then you'll feel very at home, but if not then you're going to have a bit of a surprise when you land. Everything is built for the car enjoyer in mind, with the European ideal of a short walk to a cafe or supermarket a laughable dream in the face of ten-lane highways optimised for continuous flow (meaning long double-back slip roads which make just crossing the highway or changing direction a 2km drive). Another thing to note with urban areas designed in this way is the noise. Any road with more than two lanes is loud, so with the ten lanes on the border of Balakong/Cheras near my apartment (and with seemingly the same window fitting company's handiwork from Vietnam), even on the 25th floor the road noise was a feature). That said, everything was still in reach and the lifestyle overall is one of very high convenience and availability, but more on that in a moment.
I'm going to meet the expectations of at least one of my subscribers who described me as 'the worst traveller I know' here by saying that across the 28 days in Malaysia I tried exactly zero local dishes (I really wanted to and even thought about it when considering where to travel from London, but it just didn't end up happening). As a weak defence I did try but didn't have any cash, and my bank card has expired leaving me unable to withdraw cash anywhere so it was an Apple-Pay-or-nothing situation. That said, I did see a lot of dishes with my own eyes and they looked and smelled good, for what it's worth. Apologies for letting the team down on this one.
It's impossible to write anything about Kuala Lumpur and not mention the malls. Again it seems the city planning is heavily inspired by the US model but with a unique flavour. It's common to find malls with residential apartments towering directly overhead, which feels a bit like a step towards capsule-living in which leaving the building you work/live/socialise in is completely optional outside of healthcare and travel. This is great if you've fully subscribed to the capitalist utopia of owning nothing and being happy about it, but if you might like your future to include growing veggies and touching grass once in a while then you might feel a sense of existential dread walking around central Kuala Lumpur. Not to say I don't appreciate it, it has to be said the very center is a marvel of modern construction (especially the Petronas Towers, KL Tower, and the Maybank tower), but on balance I think I'd prefer just a bit more integrated nature.
One of the highlights of Malaysia in general and Kuala Lumpur/surrounding area in particular is the security. For each of the aforementioned malls and residential blocks, there exists a team of at least five security guards (more like ten since they're cover each complex 24/7). Now I wouldn't describe these guards as the elite force of the physical security community, but nevertheless their presence and monitoring systems are all connected which means there's a generally very safe atmosphere even late at night in most built up areas. That said, I understand from one of the grab (Uber) drivers that almost all of the security staff travel from Nepal, so don't necessarily speak English or Malay, which made it tricky to build any kind of rapport (or ask small questions) but that's not the end of the world.
I also couldn't write a review about Malaysia (specifically KL and surrounding areas) without mentioning the concrete, and I mean, there is a lot of concrete. Not only in the malls mentioned above, but there are many many standalone residential blocks which are essentially six-story car parks with a further thirty floors (at least) on top. Just the raw sand required to build at this scale is absolutely mind boggling, but then you start to think about all of the other infrastructure and some of the choices that has been made around it.
For example, there are many highways which rather than running along the ground run at least 10m off ground level. With up to 8 lanes suspended at this height there is a vast forrest of concrete columns supporting these roads, and we're talking tens of kilometers in this style (which again is an engineering marvel but just boggling to think about in terms of construction costs and force needed to assemble them). The view of the towers and central KL skyline is pretty impressive from these roads though, so I recommend taking a trip out (the Eastern toll highway running south out of KL) if you get the chance.
Anyway, that's it for my short review of Malaysia. It's nice, hot, a bit sweaty/humid, and the cityscape is not somewhere I personally would visit again but that's not to say there aren't a bunch of strong positives. If I visit again it will be to a more remote coastal area, but Da Nang remains pretty competitive on that front. Also the convenience in lifestyle is pretty similar between Vietnam and Malaysia, so if I had to choose one or the other it would be Vietnam (for now), but who knows what the future holds.
Next week I'll cover a bit more about the knowledge acquisition/upskilling platform I'm building since it's becoming a pretty cool project and I think something that the companies I've worked at could stand to benefit quite substantially from 👀 but details to come. I also haven't forgotten about the international finance post, it's coming I promise.
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
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