Men dressed as ladies

Every journey hits the gutter sooner or later and we found the gutter on a visit to Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur's seedy and rather downmarket red light district. The area is home to a rabbit warren of food and fruit stalls, cheap clothing vendors, and loud shopping centres and bazaars blaring music as sleazy looking local chaps wander around the streets.

Our local guide for the evening drove us to Chow Kit in a four wheel drive vehicle (though Chow Kit has its own monorail station) so the first challenge was scouring every poky alley in search of a parking spot. That achieved, we explored the stalls and had some fresh fruit juice before going down to check out the street where all the action is.

Chow Kit ain't Manila or Bangkok. I dare say the nightlife is better in Baghdad than here. Dark run down streets populated by possibly the world's ugliest transvestites and the occasional aging woman dressed in a sari, all lurking about doorways and calling out sweet nothings. After a five minute walk around this somewhat pathetic area we headed off, we had seen the gutter and it wasn't worth seeing.