Genting Highlands, Malaysia

We took a pleasant Airasia flight from Phuket to KL and headed again to our accomodation in China town inn. Double room for 20euros. It was already my third time in Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia so I was getting a little bit more familiar with places. Our plan was to have a good sleep before heading to Genting highlands with it's casinos. I bought a genuine Versace belt from the Chinatown market to wear with my suit.

Getting to Genting highlands from KL is really easy. There are shuttle buses driving there hourly from KL central and it costs only a bit over 1 euro for a bus+skyrail. Skyrail is a gondola which takes you around 700meters up to 2000meters and where all the hotels and casinos are. We had booked the most expensive World club room from the World's largest hotel: The first world hotel. It has incredible 6118 rooms, I don't know if any hotel already beats this?

We were pretty excited to enter the first world plaza and see all the theme parks, casinos, statue of liberty, eiffel tower, venice with gondolas and much else. When we finally had found our way to the lobby of our hotel the place resembled me of a busy trainstation: Announcements, heaps of people queuing for the checkins and big big lobby with lots of signs. Well backpacker won't queue and we hit straight to the Worldclub special check-in where there was not any queue whatsoever. Man behind the counter first told us to go to register, or do some kind of other checkin but when we showed him that we really had booked the World Club room things started to go better. We got our room keys and were told to take the lift to the most highest, 24th floor, in the 1st tower. This accomodation was a little bit of contrast to our previous accomodations, for example in Koh Lanta we had a bungalow with cockroaches, flies and outside-toilet without flush.

Well without going too much into details we had good time in the firstworld plaza. The place itself is huge and we spent the afternoon just by wandering around, checking all the rides available and also visited the Mr. Ripley's believe or not museum. Good fun. We went to look through some of the menus since we were planning to have a good big dinner but didn't got always the best service. We decided to go back to the room, put on our new cashmere suits and see what would happen. Well the effect was pretty good, since we were pretty much the only Westerns in the plaza and now looked like the genuine businessmen would. We were called "sir" all the time and we got much more space in the crowd than before. We ended up having a Asian buffet with heaps of different food varieties, but unfortunately not many of them were really good for our western taste. Well we picked couple of our favourite foods and got our stomachs full.

With big tummies, we tried to make our way to the other side of the massive complex. We had bought tickets to the evening show, the Carneval. We paid a bit more from the tickets and were immediately led to the front row when arriving to the arena. The show itself was really good with East European dancers, chinese acrobatics and the mad amazon woman with her crossbows.

After the show was time to check out the casinos. One of the interesting thing was that in the casino there was nobody drinking alcohol. Apparently muslims here are having their kicks from gambling and other stuff. Well to be honest it looked like the casino was full of chinese cigarette addicts and we wondered around for a while trying to find a texas hold'em table. Well no luck, since there was no texas in any of three casinos but we decided to check out the blackjack instead. It took a while to understand that the 'blackjack' is called 'pontoon' here. I played for a while and lost my money with serenity. Pete was lucky and made some profit. Well anyway it was getting so late that we went to sleep already. Pete had 4 hours time to sleep before he had to take a taxi to the airport for his flight back to Finland. When Pete was sitting in the plane towards Europe I enjoyed the nice breakfast in the special World Club lounge with businessmen and their laptops. The image of backpacking was further fading...