Kuala Lumpur is a city caught in a metropolitan limbo. It aspires to be Singapore, but at times feels more like Bangkok. It is this tension between the clean, clinical efficiency of business-like Singapore, and the raffish rough edges of the Thai capital, that conjures up much of the Malaysian capital's undoubted charm.

In Kuala Lumpur, you can be skimming across town on the monorail past the soaring, record-breaking, Petronas Towers one minute and the next you are dumped at street level amongst the aromatic orgy of hawker stands and the unwelcome reality of traffic chaos.

This is all a far cry from the city's low-key origins, when a huddle of poor tin miners first crowded around the mosquito-ridden banks of the slimy Gombak and Klang rivers in 1857. Little could they have imagined that within a century and a half, Kuala Lumpur would have metamorphosed into one of Asia's most vibrant and compelling cities.

Kuala Lumpur, meaning ‘muddy confluence', has grown with bewildering speed since these early days; a growth that accelerated during the 1980s and early 1990s as the ‘Asian Tiger' economy propelled the ever-changing skyline.

The speed of change has resulted in old Chinese houses and faded colonial mansions idling alongside huge gleaming glass and steel towers, while food hawkers and traditional fortune tellers share the streets with bustling businessmen and guidebook toting tourists.

The city is not so much a melting pot or clichéd contrast between old and new, but rather an ever-evolving jungle of buildings, which seem to have sprouted organically from the sweaty vegetation and murky rivers that still snake through the heart of town.

One of the most admirable aspects of the city is the level of tolerance displayed by its cosmopolitan residents, with ethnic Malays, Chinese, Indians and Europeans all living and working together with few racial problems - certainly far less than those experienced in Western Europe or North America.

For many Malaysians, Kuala Lumpur is quite simply the Ibukota (‘Mother City') and as such it is treated with great reverence and abbreviated fondly to ‘KL'.

Over the last few years a whole swathe of construction and infrastructure projects have seen the city's skyline become crowded with cranes and clanking machinery as entire neighbourhoods have undergone redevelopment.

The emergence of Putrajaya, the new administrative capital, and Cyberjaya, the key section of the new Multimedia Super Corridor, are now steering Malaysia back towards the course set by former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad with the aim of becoming a fully developed nation by 2020.

One relative constant in Kuala Lumpur is the climate, with consistently warm daytime temperatures, balmy evenings and afternoons that are often punctuated by thunderstorms, usually passing quickly to leave the evenings cool and rain free.