Another day, another city to explore. Since the Petronas Towers is probably the most famous building in Kuala Lumpur we decided to make it our first port of call. Unfortunately our late night last night and our buffet breakfast with its many tempting offerings (we passed on the curry – not for breakfast!) meant that we were too late to get one of the free tickets up to the skybridge. So for today we had to make do with amusing ourselves in the tat, I mean tourist shop (selling every conceivable souvenir emblazoned with the towers or in the shape of the towers) and in the huge shopping mall at the base of the towers. I know it sounds like we spent a lot of our time at the moment in shopping malls but don’t worry we are not enjoying ourselves and spending lots of money on fine clothes, mainly we are just enjoying the air conditioned comfort!
We were in the mood for going up a high building today so we headed towards the KL Skytower, which is the fourth tallest communications tower in the world. We didn’t think 100 extra metres (compared to the Auckland tower) would make much difference but when we got up there it really did. It was high and everything down below looked like little dots. Even Si wasn’t tempted to do anything crazy like jump off from this height. Which was just as well since the ‘adrenalin’ entertainment in the form of a flying fox (only from the base of the tower which is at the top of a small hill) looked pretty tame. We weren’t quite sure what all the screaming was about, we could only conclude that these people obviously haven’t been to New Zealand.
As we left the tower we saw a couple of monkeys hanging around the sign that read ‘Don’t feed the monkeys’ (ah, if only they could read!). The sight of Malaysia’s answer to the kangeroo tempted us into the city rainforest walk to see if we could see anymore. Sadly the monkeys remained elusive, however we did encounter some wildlife, in the form of our arch enemies the mosquitos (is there no escape?)
On our way home we called into the Malaysia Tourist Centre and ended up trying lots of exotic Malaysian fruits, some nice, like the hairy mangosteen, some not so nice, like the rotten feet smelling durians, that are also banned from many public places, including our hotel!