World Tour - Europe, Asia, North and South America - Entries for: Malaysia
29° | sunny / rainy | km 830
Looking for a way out!
on 2017-01-26 in Malaysia
A day later we made our way to the border where after some discussion we convinced the Malaysian officials that we really do need our Carnet de Passage filled out. Since they had never done this before Denis explained everything step by step. Fabi and Basti coincidentally met an Austrian expat on his GS at the border. After a pleasant conversation we crossed successfully into Malaysia with all necessary documents. Since it was already late in the evening we decided to find a nearby hotel and stay the night.
We decided to take smaller roads towards Kuala Lumpur the next day. And soon we were rewarded by some nice corners and a sweet scenery. Only on the last stretch we decided to take the highway which, to our pleasant surprise, turned out to be free for motorcycles. We had booked a hostel before we arrived in Kuala Lumpur because we did not want to start looking for a place once we arrived. In the evening we arrived at a hostel called Homie KLL. This turned out to be the perfect spot for us and we would be spending most of our time in Malaysia here. We were once again greeted with so much hospitality that we immediately felt at home.
For the first day in Kuala Lumpur we had an important task planned. We needed to find a cargo flight to ship our bikes to North America! We thought it would be a good idea to go to the airport without our bikes but we were dead wrong.
We took the Metro and the very expensive airport express to the airport just to find out that we could not get to the cargo area from the terminals. We still needed to go 10 kilometers on the highway around the airport to be at the right spot... So we had to take a cab for the rest of the way. We had spent already quite some time just to get to the airport so we were quite tired already when we started looking for options. We had tried contacting a couple of offices but none of them answered via email. We got some visitor passes in exchange for our passports at the entrance and soon we found ourselves in a large area with tons of containers and palettes. We decided to simply go door by door into each office and ask for help. After a couple of hours we had about three companies at hand. All of them sounded confident in shipping our bike to our intended destination. Later we decided on MASkargo the last company that we had asked. They were immediately the company which we had the best impression with as well. After we had gotten most of the answers to our questions, Joanne from MASkargo even took us back to the airport from where we would be getting back via public transport.
The next day we started well rested to do our usual sightseeing tour of the cities we visit. Our most important spots on the list were the Petronas Towers, the Menara Tower and the Batu Caves. We had an incredible view from the Menara Tower over the entire city and we were surprised how many parts of the city were still green. There were some large areas covered only by plantation and trees. The city does not look as overpopulated like many others that we have seen so far. What a pleasant surprise!
After we had seen the most important places and settled any questions regarding the planned transport of our bikes we headed further south towards Singapore. We knew that getting into Singapore with the bikes would be very expensive due to road taxes, insurances and so on, which is why we decided to go by bus instead. We parked our bikes in Johor Bahru at the hotel Zen Zeng where we stayed the night before. On our way out of Malaysia we quickly realized that we probably would have never left Germany if we were not on motorcycles.
We decided to take smaller roads towards Kuala Lumpur the next day. And soon we were rewarded by some nice corners and a sweet scenery. Only on the last stretch we decided to take the highway which, to our pleasant surprise, turned out to be free for motorcycles. We had booked a hostel before we arrived in Kuala Lumpur because we did not want to start looking for a place once we arrived. In the evening we arrived at a hostel called Homie KLL. This turned out to be the perfect spot for us and we would be spending most of our time in Malaysia here. We were once again greeted with so much hospitality that we immediately felt at home.
For the first day in Kuala Lumpur we had an important task planned. We needed to find a cargo flight to ship our bikes to North America! We thought it would be a good idea to go to the airport without our bikes but we were dead wrong.
We took the Metro and the very expensive airport express to the airport just to find out that we could not get to the cargo area from the terminals. We still needed to go 10 kilometers on the highway around the airport to be at the right spot... So we had to take a cab for the rest of the way. We had spent already quite some time just to get to the airport so we were quite tired already when we started looking for options. We had tried contacting a couple of offices but none of them answered via email. We got some visitor passes in exchange for our passports at the entrance and soon we found ourselves in a large area with tons of containers and palettes. We decided to simply go door by door into each office and ask for help. After a couple of hours we had about three companies at hand. All of them sounded confident in shipping our bike to our intended destination. Later we decided on MASkargo the last company that we had asked. They were immediately the company which we had the best impression with as well. After we had gotten most of the answers to our questions, Joanne from MASkargo even took us back to the airport from where we would be getting back via public transport.
The next day we started well rested to do our usual sightseeing tour of the cities we visit. Our most important spots on the list were the Petronas Towers, the Menara Tower and the Batu Caves. We had an incredible view from the Menara Tower over the entire city and we were surprised how many parts of the city were still green. There were some large areas covered only by plantation and trees. The city does not look as overpopulated like many others that we have seen so far. What a pleasant surprise!
After we had seen the most important places and settled any questions regarding the planned transport of our bikes we headed further south towards Singapore. We knew that getting into Singapore with the bikes would be very expensive due to road taxes, insurances and so on, which is why we decided to go by bus instead. We parked our bikes in Johor Bahru at the hotel Zen Zeng where we stayed the night before. On our way out of Malaysia we quickly realized that we probably would have never left Germany if we were not on motorcycles.