A spot of the good life

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KLCC Park as viewed from our hotel room!

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     On arrival at the smelly bus station with no Ringitts, it was Nick's idea to walk across the centre of KL with our big backpacks, rather than catch the train.  This meant, it was two very sweaty people who stumbled into the exquisite 5 star Mandarin Oriental, they let us carry our own bags through the door, so the porters probably hadn't thought we were staying there.  We stayed at this hotel on our honeymoon and it was to be a treat to ourselves to return for 2 nights, almost 2 years to the day when we had stayed there previously.  The hotel seemed to think we were on honeymoon again (we had told them in our booking that it was our anniversary), Lizzi was greeted with a bunch of roses, and we had a free room upgrade to one identical to that which we had on honeymoon, with the same magnificent view over KLCC park. Once in our room, a knock on the door bought a free platter of belgium style chocolates, and we quickly relaxed in our fluffy dressing gowns, drinking the complementary tea, eating the chocolates and devouring the complementary fruit bowl.  While Nick did what he does best and settled into some crummy TV, Lizzi made her way down to the gym, only to be persuaded to join in with the yoga class that had just started.  The rather camp instructor was excellent and really got us sweating, at the end gave us all a quick deep massage and cracked our backs;  heaven!  Too lazy to go out we decided we'd continue in the 5 star mode and head to one of the restaurants in the hotel we had also gone to on honeymoon, and had a suitably smart, posh meal with all the little extras, but without the price of back home.

    Our second day, brought trouble to paradise, as Nick had his travellers cheques rejected, a broken cashpoint machine did not dispense us the money we asked for and our credit cards were being rejected.  Luckily a few phonecalls sorted all this out, needless to say some English banks are now more in our favour than others.  He had a surprise facial booked for the afternoon and whilst he was there Lizzi was the only one who turned up for the dance class in the gym so had a one on one salsa lesson, which was very tiring and very funny.  We were very pleased with ourselves in the evening as we went to Chinatown to try and find this remote Chinese/Malay restaurant we had loved last time we were in KL and managed to find it!  The rest of our time was pretty much spent in the gym/health suite, KLCC park and browsing the shops, just generally chilling out, ready for our next stop the Teman Negara....