Hello beautiful people, and welcome back on the route! 🙂
Today we are going to talk once more about the beatiful Malaysia, and after seeing the best things to do in Johor Bahru, and exploring the Aquarium of KL, today we will move to a place a bit more out of the beaten path… a place that the first time you see a photo of it, looks like two different pictures accidentally merged into one: Genting Highlands!
Genting Highlands is a city of casinos, theme parks and shopping malls sitting on top of a mountain in the middle of a rainforest, roughly 1,800 metres up and about an hour north of Kuala Lumpur.
At the time of writing, GH holds the largest hotel on the planet (the First World Hotel…we will talk about it later! 😉 ).
Then, it has the only legal casino in a country where more than half the population is legally barred from entering it (against Muslim law!).
On the positive side, temperature up there sits between 16°C and 25°C while the rest of Malaysia is normally sweating all year long at an average of 33°C, and the clouds rarely pass overhead (clear skies are very common!).
Around 20 million visitors come to GH every year, (although most of them are Malaysians!).
The curious bit is that the GH municipality is quite recent: sixty years ago there was nothing on that mountain…. No hotel, no town, not even a road!
Then, one man decided to build the road himself, with his own money, before anyone had agreed there should be anything at the top of it.
Hereafter, you will find what Genting Highlands actually is, how it ended up there, and the five things worth your time once you arrive 😉
🚌How to get there? Genting Highlands is today very accessible. The most convenient option is surely by bus. From KL, it is about an hour ride, while from Singapore, you can take a SG to Genting Bus from just 30 SGD per person: affordable, easy, 6-7 hours ride with A/C and possibility to overnight! 🙂
Let’s start with order!
What Genting Highlands actually is?
Geographically speaking, GH is a hill station on Mount Ulu Kali, in the Titiwangsa range that runs down the spine of peninsular Malaysia, in the state of Pahang.
The resorts stays between 1,800 and 1,865 metres above sea level.
Practically speaking instead, GH is a vertical entertainment complex nested in the jungle!
Hotels stacked on hotels, malls connected by walkways, an indoor theme park, an outdoor theme park, two cable cars, a Taoist temple on the way up and a casino that runs 24 hours a day.
The thing that makes it genuinely odd is the casino, and the reason is worth understanding before you go.
Malaysia is a Muslim-majority country and gambling is prohibited for Muslims.
Genting holds the only casino licence ever granted in the country, and it has never been granted to anyone else.
For the first twelve years the floor was open to everyone.
Then in 1983, Malay Muslims were formally barred.
Malaysian identity cards state religion, which makes the rule enforceable at the door in a way it would not be almost anywhere else in the world! (crazy isn’t it? :)).
So you have a resort that a large share of the country can visit, eat at, shop in and ride the roller coasters of, but cannot legally walk into one particular room of xD
In 2024 an Islamic party called for the casino to be shut down altogether, and the argument comes back periodically, the negotiations about Genting Casino is an ongoing national dispute 🙂
But from the beginning…
How was GH born in the first place?
Lim Goh Tong was a man born in Fujian, China, on 28 February 1918.
He originally arrived in Malaya in 1937 and spent his first two years working as a carpenter for his uncle.
By the mid-sixties he had made money in construction and mining, and he became fixated on a stretch of untouched jungle on Ulu Kali.
The problem was obvious to everyone who heard the idea: there was no way to get there!
He stubbornly registered his own personal construction company on 27 April 1965 and started building the road the same year,financing it at his own expense!
Imagine, a road to nowhere in the middle of the jungle…crazy for most… but Lim had a vision! ;D
In 1969 the country’s first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, came to see what he was doing.
He was impressed enough that Genting was granted the casino licence, on the grounds that Lim was developing Malaysian tourism without a cent of government money.
The first hotel in Genting Highlands opened on 8 May 1971 and Lim run his business until he died on 23 October 2007, by which point the company he started had become a global operator!
Incredible what sheer determination can do in life! 😀
Five things worth doing up there
1. Ride the theme park that lost a 1.75 billion dollar lawsuit
If you’re planning to take a one/two day ride to Genting Highlands, here are few things you should check out, starting with…the outdoor park!
This entertainment park was supposed to open as 20th Century Fox World, the first Fox-branded theme park anywhere on earth.
Then Disney bought Fox, the arrangement collapsed, and in November 2018 Genting sued Disney and Fox for 1.75 billion dollars.
The parties settled.
Genting kept a licence to some pre-2019 Fox properties, filled the rest with other intellectual property, dropped the Fox name entirely and opened it as “Genting SkyWorlds” on 8 February 2022.
The park works surprisingly well despite being the result of a court case and the setting does a lot of the work: outdoor roller coasters at 1,800 metres, frequently running straight into a cloud!
The park offers a whooping 26 rides and attractions across 26 acres, split into nine themed worlds: Central Park, Studio Plaza, Epic, Eagle Mountain, Rio, Andromeda Base, Liberty Lane, Robots Rivet Town and Ice Age.
There are attractions for all ages 🙂
Indoors there is Skytropolis, with more than 25 rides under a roof, which is the smarter choice on a wet afternoon:)
2. Take both cable cars,
because they are not the same one!
A lot of guides we read get these two mixed up, so it is worth being precise!
The “Genting Skyway” is the long one, 3.38 km, running at 6 metres per second.
The Awana SkyWay is 2.4 km and climbs around 620 metres in about ten minutes.
Either way you are suspended over primary rainforest with mist moving below you, and on a clear stretch you can see the canopy for kilometres.
For the money, it is the best thing at Genting in our opinion! 🙂
3. Get off halfway at the Chin Swee Caves Temple
Most people photograph it through the cable car window and carry on.
My personal 5 cents…getting off is worth it!
Chin Swee is a Taoist temple, not a Buddhist one, although it was built in honour of a Buddhist monk from Fujian.
This average-sized temple covers 28 acres of hillside, with a pagoda, statues and walkways arranged down a slope that falls away into forest.
The peculiar point of a walk to Chin Swee is that it gives you the one thing the rest of the resort does not: quiet time! And the view from the Pagoda is gorgeous too! 🙂
4. Sleep in the biggest hotel on Earth!
We talked about it before in the introduction…and here it is!
The First World Hotel is a gargantous hotel complex which opened on 26 July 2002 and has 7,351 rooms! (more than the tiny village where I was born ahah!).
The FWH currently holds the Guinness World Record for the largest hotel by room count and has held it again since 2015!
The hotel is not an overly luxurious experience (good luck filling 7500 rooms at crazy prices! eheh).
Rooms are small and basic, and the corridors are long enough that finding yours the first time takes a while.
But it is cheap, it is connected to everything, and there is something quietly ridiculous about checking into a building with more rooms than most villages have houses! All in all, cool place to check out! 🙂
5. Walk the casino floor, even if you never place a bet
You do not need to gamble.
What is worth seeing is the fact of the place: the only legal land casino in Malaysia, open around the clock, with security checking national ID cards at the entrance and turning away citizens on the basis of the religion printed on them.
Whatever you think about gambling, that door is one of the more unusual things you can stand next to in Southeast Asia!
Getting there from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur
From Kuala Lumpur, Genting Highlands is around an hour by road, which is why so many people go up for a single night.
From Singapore it is roughly 415 km, and the overland coach is what most travellers take.
Journey time runs 5.5 to 7 hours depending on traffic and how long the Johor Causeway takes, with departures from before dawn until nearly midnight and fares starting around SGD 30.
Overnight services leave late evening and arrive at the resort near daybreak, which saves both a hotel night and a day of daylight 🙂
The cheapest and most flexible option to get a ride there, is to use a Bus Online Ticket platform 🙂
What nobody tells you before going up
Bring a jacket!!!!
Everyone forgets, and the shops up there make a decent living from the people who forgot XD
Temperature may drop to around 15°C at night (if you ask me, I LOVE it ahah), which after Singapore feels colder than the number suggests 🙂
Bring something waterproof too.
Clouds do not arrive politely at Genting, they simply appears, and a clear terrace can turn into zero visibility in a few minutes 🙂
Frequently asked questions
How high is Genting Highlands?
Between roughly 1,800 and 1,865 metres above sea level, on Mount Ulu Kali in the Titiwangsa range. Temperatures sit between about 16°C and 25°C all year, dropping to around 15°C at night.
Can anyone go into the casino?
No. Muslims are barred from the casino floor and identity cards are checked at the entrance. Everything else at the resort, including both theme parks, the malls and the cable cars, is open to all visitors.
How long does the bus from Singapore take?
Between 5.5 and 7 hours across roughly 415 km, depending on traffic and the Johor Causeway crossing. Overnight coaches arrive at the resort around dawn.
How many days do you need at Genting?
Two days covers the main attractions comfortably. Three is worth it if you want both theme parks, both cable cars and the temple without rushing.
Is it good for families?
Yes. Skytropolis is indoors, Genting SkyWorlds is outdoors, and both are within walking distance of the hotels, which matters a lot when the weather changes.
What is the largest hotel in the world?
The First World Hotel at Genting, with 7,351 rooms. It opened in 2002 and has held the Guinness World Record again since 2015.
Conclusions 🙂
All in all, Genting Highlands is a dense block of concrete and neon dropped onto a ridge in the middle of a rainforest, and the first time it appears through the mist it can be genuinely disorienting!
What makes it worth the trip is how unlikely all of it is xD
It’s curious to see, a getaway from KL, and a refreshing entertaining experience to break the travel routine! 🙂
Before you go we would like to ask you:
- Have you been up there, and did the weather catch you out too? 🙂
- And what is the strangest place you have ever reached by bus? 😉
Let us know in the comments below! 😀
Here are a few other articles you might enjoy:
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12 surprising and unexpected fun facts about airlines
17 surprisingly good ways to kill time while travelling
Cappadocia by camper: the dream trip in the heart of Turkey
Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂
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