Stitching together my trips to Pakistan and Japan with a layover in Malaysia

April 06, 2026

Originally, my travels this spring were to last only two weeks. After my adventure in Pakistan, I was planning to return either home or to university and focus on my studies. However, I put my studies on hold when I found out my friends Brent and Joel would be travelling to Japan on their yearlong journey around the world, and another friend, Kevin, would overlap with them for his honeymoon. This constellation of events had already convinced our mutual friend Ciaran to plan his own trip to Japan during his few months of ‘funemployment,’ and my fear of missing out grew too great to bury in books.

Working within the bounds of my six-week-long holidays, I decided to travel to Japan from Pakistan without returning home. The most reasonable flight turned out to be one from Karachi to Tokyo with an eight-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur. I contemplated spending those eight hours reading at the airport or, alternatively, making a mad dash to the newly-UNESCO-listed FRIM complex at the very opposite end of the city, but then I remembered that I had a friend in Kuala Lumpur. Initially, Sammy was willing to pick me up at the airport and travel to FRIM with me, but when we met at six in the morning and opened Google Maps to check the distance, we saw that with the morning traffic this would take two hours each way, leaving us with barely an hour at the site itself. Alone, I may have been willing to do that, but I was not going to subject Sammy to such madness.

Instead, Sammy and I spent a pleasant little morning in the centre of Kuala Lumpur. I had only visited the city once and had mostly focussed on its historical sights, so we decided to do the most normie-core things he could think of. We walked around the market and ate kaya butter coconut toast with soft-boiled eggs, after which Sammy showed me some of the nearby cultural institutions: the ancestral hall belonging to the Chen family and a local library. It quickly became too hot to stay outside for very long, so we soon ducked into another café to drink some juice.

With the time of my departure quickly approaching, we made a short visit to the Museum of Islamic Art, which I had missed last time I visited Kuala Lumpur. It struck me as much larger than the number of its exhibits warranted it to be, but this has been a running theme during my entire trip. Nothing struck me as particularly special about the collection, having just travelled through Baku, Tashkent, and much of Pakistan, even though many of the objects on display were beautiful. I wished there had been a greater focus on Southeast Asian Islam, as I had seen many Mughal items during my time travelling the Indus Valley.