Scrubbing up in KL

The flight from Sumatra to Malaysia took less than an hour but the culture shock couldn't have been more extreme.

We loved Sumatra for the landscapes and biodiversity, but KL has different charms. What a city!

Slick, clean, cosmopolitan, safe, with unbelievable (to South Africans) public transport and cheap, good food. And shopping that made our eyes pop.

Built on a tin mine & carved from the jungle, KL impresses with fabulous east-meets-west architecture and infrastructure to rival the best in the world. This is the city Jozi could be.

We whizzed around on the tube, ate dirt-cheap excellent street food, dined at an Italian bistro with a few tapas accompanying our many cocktails and grappa, took in the aquarium and amazing KL Bird Park, took in movies back-to-back, and shopped like Sandton kugels released into a new mall with complementary credit cards.

In short, we were total mall rats this week, and absolutely loved it.