Last Sunday, I brought my film students to a KL walking tour by writer and radio host Kam Raslan. I’m a big fan of walking and every time I arrive in a new city, I always hit the streets on foot but without any plans made ahead.

I first heard about his walking tour inspired by the London Walking Tours around the capital a couple of years back. I knew it would be an educational and entertaining experience..

Although I originally linked the walking tour with the media ethics course I teach, which included a photo essay assignment, I opened the event to other students on the programme as a test run.

The walking tour is an exercise in cultural mapping to sharpen their awareness of cities, spaces, and cultural history amongst my film students and also to develop some general ideas about cultural mapping.

Anyways, here are three things you realise or learn from a walking tour in good ol’ Kuala Lumpur.

KL has unremarkable bridges with zero history

As we congregated on a cool and slightly drizzling Sunday morning at the Klang River Bridge along Lebuh Pasar Besar that faced the confluence of the Gombak and Klang River at the foot of Masjid Jamek, Kam remarked that unlike other major cities of the world, Kuala Lumpur bridges are rather dull and forgettably designed.

Unlike our administrative capital Putrajaya - where man-made rivers are given grandiose designed bridges, the bridges in our capital city are banal.

While KL may not exactly be a riverine city like Bangkok or even Venice, there are various bridges that cross the many rivers that slither across the city that we easily overlook because of its banality.

In fact, there are hardly any signages to even indicate the river names or to explain its significance as possibly a major route during KL’s early beginnings on the mining route - a significant part of the capital’s birth.

KL hides its rivers

As a teenager who visited my grandparents in Jalan Gurney (now renamed for the third time as Jalan Sultan Yahya Petra) in Kuala Lumpur in the mid-1990s (I grew up and lived in the capital until 1989), I would often walk to my favourite malls - now-demolished Ampang Park and Plaza Yow Chuan - and sometimes I would also walk to Bukit Bintang but I would take “unofficial” walking paths made by regular pedestrians along the Klang River from Jalan Tun Razak (across the river from Kampung Baru) where now the AKLEH elevated highway looms large above.

It was a pastoral and peaceful walk that belied the eventual construction of KLCC nearby and started KL’s obsession with skyscrapers around its vicinity.

Leap to the present, apart from the River of Life project, the rivers that sprawl through the Klang Valley are often hidden from sight and although there have been some efforts by the Selangor state government to clean up the major rivers, most still resemble our favourite Malaysian beverage, the Teh Tarik, on most days.

Simple observations like these seem trivial on paper but on the ground and in person on a walking tour like this, it takes on a different significance as we cut back from the speed and hustle of our car-centred culture.

Diverse, forgotten past revealed

My students were surprised that the Dayabumi building and later the Maybank tower nearby in old KL - the general Lebuh Medan/Central Market/Petaling Street area - were once the iconic towers of KL. They both stand unremarkable and forgotten now – especially Dayabumi – with the other financier and taller skyscrapers in the capital.

The tour took us on a loop through Dataran Merdeka, Lebuh Medan, and Central Market and ended appropriately at Sin Sze Si Ya Temple, hidden in a lane between Jalan Tun Sambanthan and Lebuh Pudu.

“Appropriate” because this temple was built by Yap Ah Loy – the third and most famous kapitan of Kuala Lumpur - and the oldest Taoist temple in the city.

However, from the outside fence, there is very little indication of its significance or even any attempt to make it stand out - with a plaque or something to denote its history for visitors - from the other buildings in the lane.

Yet, such discoveries that can only be made on on foot that away from its many shiny, oversized malls. – May 31, 2024.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.