Aviaries and Astronaut suits

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July 17th 2009

Published: July 22nd 2009

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AdventureBugs

Ostrich foot

A trait passed down from their dinosaur ancestors I reckon

Ostriches are huge and have feet which look like those of a dinosaur. That's some of what I leart from today's visit to KL's famous Bird Park, the world's largest free-flight aviary. It was unreal, like a massive well-kept garden where pelicans are neighbours with flamingos and ostriches are neighbours with peacocks. Most of the birds just fly around and are pretty social with humans and each other. At one point, we were watching the flamingos from this sweet vantage point and a Yellow-billed Stork came right up and chilled next to Kate for a while. I managed to get a cool photo of them together.

The park has a clever design. Parts of it emulated wetlands and there were heaps of sweet waterfalls and one which you could walk behind. The humidity was noticeably worse in the bird park too, I suspect it's due to all of the waterfalls coupled with the fact that the moisture can't escape as easily through the huge net that stretches across the top of the park so the bird's can't escape. Not that any of the birds would even want to escape, this place was seriously an engineered paradise for birdies.

I

Ostrich's profile

always thought ostriches were similar in size to the emus that we've got in Australian zoos. But no, ostriches I reckon weigh double that of an emu. They are quite intense up close. You can really see how birds are descendant from dinosaurs when you watch ostriches I reckon, just because of the way they move themselves. You can see the family resemblance in their as well.

After several hours in the bird park, I dragged Kate over to the National Planetarium. Unfortunately, the viewing theatrette was closed. A security guard woman informed us that it's getting renovated for an event they're hosting for IYA (International Year of Astronomy). We looked around at the exhibits on at the planetarium and some were pretty sweet. They had genuine, used space suits on display and they were cool. Definitely an old school space suit, looked to me like one from a mission during the 1970s or 80s. We had some fun in the planetarium and it was cool to show Kate the exhibit on Eclipses as we'll soon be witnessing one ourselves. Later on this afternoon we also made the effort to see the Islamic Arts Museum. That was enlightening and

Me with a spacesuit

they had models of some of the world's excellent Islamic architecture. Didn't take any photos of the Islamic Arts stuff because it was a museum which meant photography was prohibited.

Anyway, I gotta bounce, we fly to Singapore tomorrow and I need to suss out where the good hostels/hotels are at. I hope you all enjoy the photos I have posted up. Over and out, x Bugs.

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