Capital Chaos
Trip Start
May 01, 2007
1
14
18
Trip End
Ongoing
Where I stayed
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Thursday, May 31, 2007
We headed to the bustling Chinatown to check out the market, Steve added to his polo shirt collection whilst Sarah began her quest as the bargaining queen by grabbing herself one for just 10 ringgits (£1.50). We hadn't visited the Batu caves on our last visit to the capital, so the following day after a bit of searching for the local bus we headed 10km out of town to the impressive tourist trap. The cave itself was at the top of the 272 staircase which ran up alongside one massive gold Buddha. There was a great view of KL from the top, and the inside was just as striking. There were many wild monkeys inside who were constantly stealing food and drinks from the visitors. Simon got a good picture of one supping a can of coke. After taking many pics of the monkeys we made our decent back down the steep flight of steps to a great Indian restaurant at the bottom where we enjoyed a banana leaf curry. The heat was intense so we decided to head for one of the cities water parks to cool off, this just happened to be right at the other side of the city. After a quick stop at the Pudu for our swimmers we got another local bus to the Sunway Lagoon.
The Lagoon was built in a massive crater surrounded by high rise hotels and shopping centres, there was a 5 escalator decent to the entrance. As we neared the park gates Steve was getting more and more excited, like a small child at Christmas. The park had several huge water slides, a suspension bridge that spanned about 200 metres over the top of the lagoon. A theme park, a zoo and much much more. When we eventually got to the gates we decided that it was a little too expensive just to spend the remaining 2 hours there for which it was open, so we all promised Steve that we could come back tomorrow and make a full day of it.
So the next morning we got up early we need to get our free tickets for the Petronas by 8 so that we could head back to the lagoon and make a full day of it. In the foyer at the bottom of the towers they hand out 3000 tickets daily on a first come first served basis. So as you can imagine it was packed, luckily we had managed to join the snake like queuing system quite early and managed to get up to the towers connecting skyway by around 10. We had our hand luggage scanned, airport stylie and then watched a short cinematic presentation before heading up around 40 floors to the viewing section. We had about 10 minutes to take some pictures before being escorted back to ground level, we then continued with the plan of heading to the lagoon.
At the lagoon, it must have been a public holiday, this time the queues we're outrageously long, and the ticket booths sooo slow. The heat was in the high 30's and we couldn't wait to get in the pool, it must have taken an hour at least from queuing! As we waited in line, a young Malaysian girl in front of us was on her mobile, it sounded like she had some spare tickets going and sure enough she handed us 4 which got us all in for free, saving us a good £10 each! Which goes a long way over here! We had a fun day at the park, and it helped that we didn't pay as it was far too busy and hot to take full advantage of all on offer. At midday we foolishly decided to walk across the wooden suspension bridge bare footed, and apart from Simon who is inhuman we made it about 25metres before we had to turn back, we all scalded out feet pretty badly and had immediate blisters. Simon slowly wondered back to the starting point unaware of what all the fuss was about.
The next day we left KL and were heading back to Teman Negara, the world oldest rainforest with another canopy walkway.
