Kathleen
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – March 8-10, 2016
Another big, glassy, beautifully modern Asian city (like Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok), Kuala Lumpur impresses even as you fly in. The city is surrounded in every direction with palm trees (harvested for palm oil), and it is an amazing sight to behold from the air. Very very green and lush. You are also dazzled the moment you step off of the air plane with a beautiful airport, fast and smart train from airport to central city, glassy hotels, air-conditioned malls, international clothing and food chains. Somehow, it feels even more civilized then our cities back home.
We stayed at a chain hotel, Aloft Hotel, at the central train station. It was very convenient, attatched to a mall with a good suchi restaurant, and had a rooftop pool…delightful.
We went to visit the Petronas Towers, which had a brief stint as the tallest building in the world, but currently measures up at 9th. The Petronas Towers is known for having a skywalk between the two towers about half-way up. We couldn’t figure out why we didn’t go to the sky bridge last time we were in Kuala Lumpur, but we were determined this time. Unfortunately, the sky bridge was closed for some maintenance work (maybe that’s why we didn’t do it the first time,too) so we went all the way up to the top of one of the towers and were greeted with a stunning view of the entire city.
Walking out the back of the towers, there was a huge park with a kiddy theme park inside and beautiful landscaping. The flora is so stunning in this part of the world that you feel like you are in some sort of futuristic utopia. Of course they have streets and traffic and all of the rest of it, but from this perspective all you see is beautiful park and glassy highrises.
From the Petronas towers, we headed to another park close to our hotel with a famous bird park. It was a sweaty walk just to get there from the train stop, but the park did not disappoint…they had birds of every variety and color and many of them were flying free under a gigantic netted arbor. Peacocks were everywhere and it was thouroughly enjoyable. I have to admit we took a cab for the short distance back, we were dripping wet and needed a break. We had a swim on the rooftop bar (beautiful but unfortunately pretty warm) until a thunderstorm passed and then had a nice suchi dinner, something we hadn’t felt cofortable eating since leaving the states……what a treat!
Anyway, that was our one day in Kuala Lumpur, very pleasant, but really just a stop over on our way to spend a week in Bali….joy!