The problem with living in a city like Kuala Lumpur – or, indeed, any capital city – is that there is almost too much to write about. I could recommend shopping malls that I love, that provide air conditioned respite when the haze or heat are just too much to cope with. Or the food I’ve grown to love and the best food courts to get it. But part of the adventure of living in a city is discovering it for yourself, and every recommendation I make will cause an eye-roll from some one, some where.  And to be honest, in a couple of months something new will have popped up and even I will have moved on. So I decided to write about something that every visitor or inhabitant of KL will experience, and that has become something I really enjoy, in a genuine and totally twisted way. Driving.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Driving in KL isn’t a serene dream of empty roads and clearly marked junctions, in fact, it’s totally the opposite. But I really feel that I’ve got to know the city, and Malaysia, in ways that I just wouldn’t have if I’d been too scared to get behind the wheel.

I love the independence and freedom that driving gives you, and so when we heard that we were moving from Miri – a lovely town, but it basically has three roads and is not very big – I was a mixture of nerves and excitement. There is no way I wasn’t going to drive; frankly, I’m far too independent to rely on taxis and walking is not practical all the time. But friends who’d spent more time in KL than I all warned me off and I was starting to feel concerned. Given that I’d only been to KL a couple of times before I’d moved and that I essentially spent a lot of that time stuck in traffic jams, I was not looking forward to it.

As we were moving within a country, we shipped our car to Kuala Lumpur. Miri is coastal and suffers from occasional flooding during rainy season and so we had decided to buy a suitable vehicle when we moved there. A very large, four wheel drive, Toyota pick up truck. I guess I’d always had fantasies about being a Texan and the truck let me live the dream while I was driving on one of the three roads trying to get our baby girl asleep. But now, two years later, we were taking this giant vehicle to a very big, busy city. Gulp.

We knew that the truck would be delivered in about ten days after we arrived. We were staying right in the centre of KL, next to KLCC park, home of the Petronas towers. To say I was nervous was putting it lightly. I’d gone and bought a GPS tracking system in anticipation and awaited the call. And then it came – the truck was waiting! Naively I hoped that the delivery people would have actually driven the truck to me, but no. There it was, on a mini-transporter, blocking a lane of traffic on one of the main roads round KLCC. I panicked – I was kind of hoping that they’d park it for me! Papers signed, I had no choice but to strap in my daughter and just park it. I got in, and realised that I’d have to drive round the block to get back to the car park – the block in this case being the entirety of KLCC. This was my nightmare. I gritted my teeth, pulled out and realised, remembered, how much great fun driving in a city could be. I didn’t just go round the block, oh no. I was off, radio on, and I began falling in love with Kuala Lumpur.

Some people believe that you only get to know a city when you walk around it. To this, I say that they’ve only lived somewhere that isn’t hot most of the time. Give me an air-conditioned vehicle when it’s 32 degrees outside, thank you very much. After my first drive I got to know the centre very well – there’s no better starting point to getting to know the city than facing buses, taxis, ditzy tourists, school groups and of course, the crazy motorbike drivers within the first ten minutes of driving there. And that is KL in its essence. Soon I explored Chinatown and the old parts of KL, became familiar with the random one way systems and the fact that a lot of the roads have at least two names, which made following my (now redundant) GPS system pretty useless. I mastered the drive from the centre to the suburb where we were moving and soon found good shopping malls away from the tourist crowds of the centre. I was settling in.

There is so much I’ve learned about the city just from driving around. The early morning newspaper stalls that pop up when I’m driving my daughter to school. The lunchtime food stands that appear from nowhere to feed hungry office workers. Dodging the roti man, who drives his tiny motorbike laden with every form of bread product you can imagine, wider than the bike is long, it seems. Seeing every form of transport you can imagine, from Ferraris and Lamborghinis to cars that seem to be held together purely from Angry Birds stickers and enthusiasm. How ingenious Malaysians are at finding places to park, and how immortal some of the motorbike drivers must be in order to drive as crazily as they do. I’ve seen families of monkeys crossing major roads, giggling school children oblivious to the traffic chaos around them, and proud families in their best baju malaya off to a party, all piled on one bike. Passing the dusty colours of kampung houses, and noticing that durian season has started when the fruit stalls pop up everywhere, incongruous against the glossy facade of condos. This is KL. This is Malaysia, and I’ve seen it while sharing the experience with hundreds and thousands of people also driving along, stuck in a jam or relishing the ability to actually enjoy an empty road. My knowledge of Bahasa Malaysia has also improved, and I’m now brilliant at playing what is essentially a game of chicken when leaving a road toll (ten lanes into three is always amusing. If amusing means downright terrifying).

There are parts to it I don’t enjoy. Parking the truck can be awkward as so many car parks are built for much smaller vehicles than mine – and yes, there have been a few scrapes. But I enjoy the contradiction of being a female expat driving a truck with Sarawak plates in the big city far too much to change now. Plus, the truck is so big it helps to nudge into traffic jams, and the floods in KL are far worse than anything Miri ever dealt me. Oh yes, the traffic jams. Sometimes a twenty minute journey can take ninety minutes and there is nothing you can do. I do travel with supplies – snacks, drinks and a phone charger – and I’ve learned to love Malaysian radio (excluding their insistence on playing Maroon 5 as frequently as possibly). Apps such as Waze can help avoid some of the jams and getting to know the shortcuts and different routes is a badge of honour, although one time the shortcut I suspected must exist, didn’t, and it took me a 40km detour to get back. There are a lots of roads in KL, but they don’t necessarily make sense, or connect to each other.

And there are dangers too. Being an expat can mean that you’re a target for crime, whether that means bag snatching from your car, or being deliberately driven into because it’s quite likely you’ll pay up to make it all go away. I take safety precautions when driving and always keep an eye out when stopped at traffic lights for any suspicious activity. But the benefits I get from driving around outweigh these risks for me – these risks are true for any large city, not just KL.

Eighteen months in to our stay in KL and I still love driving here. I love that I can drive and park under the Petronas towers, one of the symbols of Malaysia, so easily. That if I drive south I can go to Singapore and if I head north, Penang and on to Thailand. If we were so inclined, and I actually had a GPS that worked, we could even drive back to Europe. The continent is our oyster, and KL is the pearl.

As soon as I get out of this traffic jam, of course…