Reserve a Kuala Lumpur and Kuala Selangor vacation package with the road transfer included

What you are booking

A Kuala Lumpur and Kuala Selangor vacation package is six nights on the ground, four in the capital and two at the river mouth about 65 km northwest of it, with the drive between them arranged and paid for. The figure of 1970 is per person, two of you sharing one room, and it covers nothing in the air and nothing at sea.

The two halves are sold as one because of the road, not because the sum changes. The four night part and the two night part are added together and that is the whole of it; nothing comes off for taking them at once. What you get for treating it as one trip is that the car, the room nights at both ends and the one evening on the river are lined up in a single written plan instead of three.

Four nights in Kuala Lumpur

The days here are spent in the old commercial quarter, which is a grid of two story and three story shophouses with the walkway running under the upper floor. On Lebuh Pudu stands the Taoist temple Yap Ah Loy put up in 1864, the oldest in the city, rebuilt after a fire and a flood between 1881 and 1883 and patched again in 1938 and 1949. Ten minutes on foot from it is the Hindu temple founded in 1873 by K. Thamboosamy Pillai, the oldest working one in the country, with a five tier gateway tower 22.9 m high carrying 228 carved figures, finished in 1972. Shoes come off at both.

The covered produce market at Chow Kit, between Jalan Raja Laut and Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, is the largest in the city and is worth an early morning rather than a late one, because the fish goes first and the concrete floor is hosed and slippery by nine. At night the eating is done standing up or on plastic stools on the hawker streets. In the middle of all this there is a patch of forest on a hill, gazetted as a reserve in 1906 at 17.5 hectares and down to about 9.3 hectares now, with trails, a forestry museum and a monorail station at the foot of it.

Say plainly who will not enjoy this. It is close to the equator, it is humid from dawn to dawn, the sidewalks break off without warning and crossing a road takes patience and nerve. Four days of it is a lot of walking in heat. Anyone who needs level ground, shade or a predictable bathroom will find the city half hard work.

Two nights at Kuala Selangor

The town sits on the estuary where the Selangor river empties into the Strait of Malacca. Above it is Bukit Malawati, with an eighteenth century fort raised under Sultan Ibrahim Shah and a lighthouse the Dutch first built in 1794 and the British refurbished and brought back into service in 1910; it is 27 m tall and still working. On the same crown of the hill are a flat stone once used for executions, a well once used for torture, a small museum of weapons and old currency, and the royal burial ground holding three of the early sultans, which is closed to the public. A tram runs up the slope for anyone who does not want the climb. Silvered leaf monkeys and macaques live around the summit and are used to people, but they are wild animals with no obligation to be there, and nothing about them is promised.

Below the hill is the nature park, 2.4 sq km of secondary forest and wetland behind a coastal bund, set up in 1987 and run by a nature society in partnership with the state, the first park in the country put in the hands of a body outside government. Its interpretive center is open daily from 9 in the morning to 6 at night. There are three paths: a forest trail of 550 m, a bund trail of 1.7 km around the brackish lake, and a mangrove walkway of 1.5 km. Around 155 bird species have been recorded on the estuary, 98 of them resident and 57 passing through, which is a record of what has been seen over decades and not a list of what will be out on your morning.

Across the water at Pasir Penambang the fishing boats tie up and the dried catch is sold from open fronted shops along the bank. Inland the ground flattens into paddy, which is worth a slow hour by car and is green or bare or flooded depending entirely on where the planting cycle has got to. Once the light has gone, boats work upriver to the trees the fireflies gather in, about 7 km above the town. That evening is described in full further down.

What the clock and the tide decide

Roughly half the days on this trip have an hour attached to them, which is why it sits at three on our scale of one to four. The four city days are yours from waking to sleeping. The coastal ones are not. Dusk comes fast this close to the equator and sunset falls between about seven and half past seven whatever the month, so the river evening has one window and it does not move for you. The boats leave on the schedule the operators set. The hill has a posted closing hour on the gate. The mangrove walkway reads completely differently at different states of the tide, and on a big high water parts of the lower path can be standing in it, so the park desk is worth asking on arrival rather than working from a plan made in Seattle.

The office writes the tide table for your dates, the closing hour as posted and the boat times as the operator states them into the plan you are sent. All three are subject to the people who set them and can change without anyone telling us first. That is the honest position and it is also the reason the two coastal days are arranged around fixed points rather than left loose.

The move in the middle

Northwest, and there are two ways of doing it. The older one is Federal Route 54, which the boards call Jalan Kepong at the city end and Jalan Kuala Selangor at the other. It runs 45.6 km from Kepong to Asam Jawa, a few minutes short of the town, most of it posted at 90, and the stretch between Ijok and Sungai Buloh was straightened and widened to four lanes by 2020. Until 2011 it was the only sensible way through.

The other way climbs north out of the city first and then turns west onto the toll expressway that opened on 23 June 2011 and runs 32 km from Templer Park to Ijok, two lanes each direction, six plazas, electronic payment only with no cash lanes. Kuala Selangor sits about 55 km northwest of the middle of the capital and nearer 65 by either road, so eighty minutes is a fair figure to work from. What moves that figure is the outbound traffic on the Kepong and Sungai Buloh side, which thickens from the middle of a weekday afternoon and can add the better part of an hour. The office puts the car in the late morning for that reason, and it has the second use of getting you onto the hill while the gate is still open.

How

Road. A car with a local driver, northwest out of the city to the coast. No flight, no boat, no train.

How long

About eighty minutes when the road is moving. Allow two hours if the car leaves after the middle of the afternoon.

How often

Once, on the day you and the office agree. The same road carries a public bus, route 100, out of the old market square roughly every half hour from about 6:30 in the morning to about 7:30 at night, RM7.30 one way, two hours or more.

Who runs it

A licensed local driver working under his own permit and his own terms of carriage. The office books the car and settles it in advance.

Each end taken by itself

• reserve a Kuala Lumpur vacation package, 4 nights, $1,290 on its own
• Reserve the Kuala Selangor vacation package, 2 nights, $680 on its own

One trip with a join in the middle. Four nights on foot in the capital, one road northwest, then two nights where the Selangor river runs into the strait.

Clocks that run this pair

• Day 1. You reach Kuala Lumpur under your own arrangements. Nothing is scheduled. The first room night is held from the afternoon.
• Days 2, 3 and 4. Three full days on foot in the old quarter, the temples, the produce market and the forest reserve on the hill. Nothing is timed except what you choose to time.
• Day 5. Rooms released in the late morning, then the road northwest, about eighty minutes. The afternoon goes to Bukit Malawati, which shuts at a posted hour, which is exactly why the car leaves before noon and not after lunch.
• Day 6. The nature park in whichever hours the tide suits, then the fishing settlement across the river and the flat planted ground inland. Once it is dark, the river boat if you have asked for it.
• Day 7. Rooms released in the morning. The return road to Kuala Lumpur, or onward, is yours to arrange unless you have asked the office to add the car.

What the figure holds and what it leaves to you

A price on this site covers the ground only: the rooms, the named transfers between them, and the people who meet you. It does not cover getting to the country or leaving it.

Nothing is held until the office writes back naming the six room nights, the date and hour of the car, and the boat time the operator has stated. The figure is confirmed at that point and not before.

The months this pair holds together

This is an equatorial coast and it is warm and wet in every month, so there is no closed season and no month that is ruled out. The rain arrives with the two monsoon transitions, broadly April and May and then October and November, when thunderstorms in the late afternoon are frequent and heavy and usually done inside a couple of hours. June through August tends to be the drier run on this side of the peninsula, though rain is possible in any week of the year and nobody can tell you what your six nights will do.

Two things matter more than rainfall if the evening on the river is the reason you are coming. Firefly numbers move with the season, the recent rainfall, the brightness of the moon and the condition of the mangrove and the berembang trees along the banks, which have been under pressure from development upstream for years. A bright moon or a wet evening can make a trip thin. Nothing about the insects is promised, by us or by the operators, and the same applies to the monkeys on the hill and to the birds on the mudflats. You are buying the boat seat and the road, not the animals.

Asked about this one more than once

Does taking the two places together cost less than booking each one on its own?

No. The four night part and the two night part are added together and nothing is taken off for combining them. The reason to buy it as one trip is that the road in the middle is arranged, and that the coastal evening is planned around the tide and the operator's hours instead of guessed at.

Will we see the fireflies?

Nobody can tell you that. They are insects living on a tidal river and their numbers change with the season, the rain, the moon and the state of the mangrove along the banks. What the office holds is two seats on a boat run by a licensed local operator; what is in the trees that night is outside anybody's control and is not promised. The monkeys on the hill are the same case.

Can you add the flight into Kuala Lumpur?

No. This office arranges nothing that moves by air and nothing that moves by sea. The figure covers the ground from your first night in the capital to your last morning at the river mouth, and getting into the country and out of it again is yours to organize.