Genting Highlands. If you’ve never heard of it, picture this: the world’s biggest hotel perched on top of a mountain, like some deranged monument to excess and poor decision-making. A concrete beast with over seven thousand rooms, casinos, neon-lit arcades, and enough fast food to make you question whether you’ve actually left Las Vegas or just taken a wrong turn on the strip.
We took the cable car up early in the morning, and for a moment, it felt promising. The mist curling over the jungle, the endless green stretching below—it was cinematic, almost poetic. But the moment you step off at the top, the magic is quickly ripped away. What you get instead feels like the third circle of hell, Malaysian edition.
Inside is an arcade-meets-shopping-mall nightmare. Children screaming, slot machines flashing, fast food wrappers littering the floor. The smell of fried oil and stale air conditioning wraps around you like a bad blanket. We tried to play along, to “have fun,” wandering through restaurants and arcades, convincing ourselves there might be some charm buried under the tacky chaos. There wasn’t. After an hour or two, it felt like time itself had slowed to a crawl, and my soul was slowly being crushed under the weight of fluorescent lighting.
But here’s the thing about travel, about life: sometimes the payoff comes after the misery. We planned it perfectly—leaving that hotel-shaped nightmare just in time to catch sunset at the Chin Swee Temple, not far down the mountain. And suddenly, it was like stepping into another world.
The air was cooler, cleaner. Shadows stretched across the stone courtyard as the sun slid behind the ridges. You could hear the faint shuffle of sandals, the quiet murmur of prayers, the distant clang of a temple bell. People wandered slowly, reverently, not in a rush, not with buckets of fried chicken in their hands, but with intention.
The temple itself is beautiful—layered pagodas, statues of deities standing proud against the backdrop of mist and mountain. There’s something grounding about being there, something humbling. After the chaos upstairs, it felt like the universe reminding you that peace still exists, that beauty still has a place, if you know where to look.
So yes, I can say I’ve been to the world’s biggest hotel, and I can also say I never want to go back. But that temple at sunset? That I’ll carry with me. It wasn’t about the photos or the spectacle. It was about the small, quiet moment of realizing how damn lucky I was to be standing there, breathing in mountain air, while the light disappeared behind the hills.
The hotel is a monument to human excess. The temple, a reminder of why we travel in the first place. And honestly, I’ll take the latter every time.
