I made a slight booboo a few days back and didn’t notice the onward flight to Thailand was actually two days away, in other words we had one more day to kill in KL. Fortunately, the hostel had loads of information about tours, so we signed up for a trip to the Elephant sanctuary, not realising we were getting the hostel owner to personally take us.
The first stop was Deerworld, where we hand fed ravenous deer tiny bits of carrot that had us fearing for our fingers. A couple of deer had learned if you chew t-shirt the annoying biped holding the basket of food gets distracted so you can jump up and get all the food. I’m sure I’ll have nightmares about being attacked by deer at some point. The zoo was very much of the interactive type, I had a kiss from a parrot, held a hedgehog (it was white, I thought it was some form of jungle hedgehog, but just the plain old UK type), had our hands pecked by quail, and had one very scared sugar glider (chipmunk-esque critter) use our hands as a toilet. The final animal was a rather large bear, fortunately vegetarian, who ate chocolate and Nestles milk from our hands, and was distracted long enough for a bear hug from us.
The government run Elephant sanctuary’s prime role is to move elephants from ever encroaching palm tree plantations to national parks, in the hope they stay there – the only rescue mentioned had elephants that wandered out of the park. The sanctuary is also home to elephants that can’t be returned to the wild, like the couple of baby orphans, and spend their days as part of the show. Firstly the encrusted mud is hosed off, the elephants laying down so their backs get cleaned, and enjoy every minute. We got to pass them their dinner of fruit, most of them taking it off our hands with huge slimy trunks, but a couple held their mouths open for fruit on what must be the biggest tongue I’ve ever seen. Finally, we got a quick ride on the stubbly back of an elephant, nicely cleaned only minutes earlier, so I’m pretty sure it was the keeper that smelled so bad.
We had time on the way back to drive up to the Genting Highlands, Las Vegas in the mists (sic) of KL – the air was cold and at 6118 ft our heads were in the clouds, that’s probably why half the theme park was inside. Poking out through the mist was the bizarrely multicoloured largest hotel in the world with 6118 rooms, and the inevitable airport style check-in desks. Altogether a packed day, maybe it wasn’t so bad I can’t read flight times properly..