Bagan Lalang, Sepang

Bagan Lalang, is a small public beach about an hours drive from Kuala Lumpur. It's very easy to get there as it's on the same highway to get to KLIA and LCCT. You basically take the turnoff to the Sepang F1 and LCCT from the KLIA highway and then take the road to Kuarters KLIA. From the roundabout, keep going straight. After that just follow the signs to get to Hotel Sri Malaysia, Sepang and Sungei Pelek. You'll end up at the beach.

The beach is rather clean with white sands, though the water is muddy as a lot of the west coast of Malaysia consists of mudflats, and there are mangroves and a river nearby. So expect to dig up little crabs and clams when building your sand castles. At high tide, it doesn't get deep and is relatively calm so kids can play close to the shore.

There are shady trees all along the beach, so you can lay picnic mats and such and stay in the cool of the shade.

Along the narrow beach road, there are stalls that sell the usual snacks, toys and floats and t-shirts. If you're not into swimming, you may want try kite flying and all sorts of kites are available at reasonable prices.

Unfortunately there are no good public facilities, especially toilets, showers and changing facilities. There is only one small shack where you have to pay about 0.80sen for a shower with very low water pressure and only two shower stalls. It's not very clean. Simple public showers by the beach with changing rooms would have been much better.

Food, there are a few seafood restaurants. Unfortunately these seem to be poorly managed. There didn't seem to be enough places for the amount of people on the weekend, and the restaurants seem ill equipped to handle the weekend crowd. Since there are no table numbers, menus and apparently staff, you're going to have to chase people around and check whether what you've ordered is really coming and figure out the system. We had to wait over an hour for our food and drinks.

Overall this place has much promise, since it's very accessible now due to the KLIA airport. It's a shame though that there isn't better support from the local government. If the restaurant owners got some assistance in basic F&B management they could be doing much better. Similarly improving the public facilities, including the water-front shops would do wonders in getting more people to come back and improving business opportunities for the local folk. This is where the BN government has really failed in terms of "development". While a few folks probably got millions, from the highway development, the lives of the local folk could do so much better with a little bit of assistance and guidance.

For now unfortunately it's not worth a return trip. Without good facilities, it's hard to come with kids, and if it's faster to drive home to eat, might as well eat at a good restaurant in the city. Hopefully things could be improved to warrant a return trip in future. Lumut Jetty is a very good example of how things can be improved with a little bit of government support.