From Merapoh we took a train and a long distance bus back to Kuala Lumpur to celebrate New Years Eve. We found some interesting “German” advertisement 😁

And the remnants of Christmas in Asian style🎄

And a nice Mediterranean restaurant with delicious food, live music …

… and a good cocktail deal 🥳

On the roof terrace of one of the many malls, we enjoyed a funny Asian concert 🎶

The Maybank tower displayed a sand clock…

… and at midnight there were some but not too crazy fireworks 🎇

We met a lot of nice people 🤗

Got a bit confused while searching for another party spot 🙃

But eventually found the main party area which reminded me quite a bit of the Reeperbahn in Hamburg but in a different style 💃🕺

This was our next aquarium without any outside windows for the new years eve time 😁

Back in Kazakhstan, we decided to go to Malaysia because there were a lot of climbing routes. More than in Vietnam for example. After we arrived, we found out that one of the biggest climbing areas close to Kuala Lumpur called Bukit Takun (open on thecrag.com) recently became unaccessible. So we started trying out the other climbing sectors of the Batu Caves area in the north of Kuala Lumpur. The wall of the Nyamuk (open on thecrag.com) was very beautiful and pretty high 🚀

There were a lot of interesting routes and we met some local climbers who helped us reading the topo and gave us some recommendations. Some routes were to wet from the last heavy rains but we did very good climbing and got used more and more to the tropical rocks and tufa. Because most of the routes were pretty high, and we could only bring our 50m rope, we had to repell ourselves from bolts so we’d recommend to bring a 70m rope, if possible. The bolts etc. we’re in very good condition. Nyamuk translates to mosquito but it was not too bad. Of course we had mosquito repellent with us 🦟

The access to the Volleyball Site crag (open on thecrag.com) was very special. On the photo you see a restaurant and event place and behind that is the climbing crag. The access seems to be possible mostly on weekends and there were contact numbers to book sessions during the week (details on thecrag.com) 🎉

To access it, you have to go through the restaurant and on the roof of one of their buildings everything starts. When we arrived there, it was a nice atmosphere and a lot of climbers were there. After talking to some, we found out that they were from Singapore and enjoyed the cheaper Kuala Lumpur and climbing. There were easy and hard routes and all in good condition 😁

The cheapest place to stay we found, was the ARK BATU CAVES HOTEL (see it on Google Maps) which was not too far from the climbing crags. It was 70RM on weekdays and 80RM on weekends. We called our room the aquarium because it had no windows at all. It could rain, storm or the world could burn, you wouldn’t notice in the aquarium 🤣

But the walk to the crags was easy and not too long and that was the most important to us. Actually the walk got quite longer because we had to take  detour for one of the very few pedestrian bridges 🙂