Kampung Baru and Chinatown

Thursday morning started out with a walking tour of a unique Malay neighborhood called Kampung Baru. Kampung Baru is a traditional Malay village located right in the middle of downtown KL. When the Chinese first came to Malaysia and settled in KL, the local Malays moved away from the city so that they could continue their traditional lifestyle. The Sultan was unhappy about this, and offered Malays land in Kampung Baru for free in exchange for meeting three conditions: 1. They must build a traditional Malay house on the land. 2. They must cultivate the land with trees or crops, and 3. They must never sell the land. Because of these unique conditions, a traditional Malay village still exists on land that would otherwise be prime land for high rise commercial development today. Despite all of the development pressures and repeated attempts to redevelop the land, the village still stands for the moment. You can see great examples of Malay architecture and eat many traditional foods from the hawkers in this neighborhood. Our tour was led by Angie Ng, an expert guide who has provided many other tours and travel services to Ben and Steph's visitors.

We started at the train station but quickly found ourselves in the midst of the village.



Along the way we passed many food vendors. Fran tried some unnamed fruit similar to the Jackfruit (as if that helps!) that smelled like gasoline. He tried it raw and fried (fried ok, raw not so good. No surprise there!). He also tried Chicken Curry Puffs (very tasty!) It is very common to see food presented this way, buffet style at curbside, no heatsource and in an open air patio restaurant. This takes some getting used to for Westerners but this is second nature to the Malays. It's not unusual to see 4 or 5 restaurants like this on each block in some parts of town.

The tour actually went through this house, where an elderly woman lived. It's an excellent example of traditional Malay house architecture, on stilts for airflow and protection from flood waters, as well as several other advantages. You can see how close Kampung Baru is to the ever expanding modern core of KL.

Another stop on the tour was the neighborhood mosque. All the women on the tour (which was everyone except Fran - touring apparently not so popular with the men!) donned head scarves to comply with Islamic law regarding entering mosques.

After the tour we stopped off at the KLCC for yet another visit to Bread Story, more crafts shopping, and some produce shopping. We wanted to make sure we tried more of the local fruit, so we picked up some rambutan (spiky red fruits from the picture in the earlier post), mangosteen (reddish, sort of pomegranite-like on the outside) and dragonfruit. So far we like the mangosteen the best.

In the evening we went to Chinatown for shopping and dinner. We made some major shopping finds at both the native arts dealer and Peter Hoe. The credit card took quite the dent there, but the ringget-to-dollar conversion softens the blow considerably! Here's a typical Chinatown street scene.

Ben and Steph took us to Old China Cafe for dinner. They are now regulars there and the staff all recognized them and fawned over Eleanor.

Just next door to the restaurant is this wonderful tea shop, where we finished off our evening with some impulse buys.

Katie and I were also interested in checking out the nightlife in KL, so we headed back out with Ben to the club district where we learned that sandals will prevent you from getting into many of the clubs. No worries, we found a nice outdoor bar to kick back with a few drinks and listen to the American remixed dance music and do some serious people watching before heading back in for the night.