Kuala Lumpur

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A real city! We left Maumere at around 4:00 PM and went through Denpasar all the way to Kuala Lumpur and arrived at around 2:00 AM. Not bad. The two and a half hours it took to wipeout a whole month of overland travel from Kuta Beach to Maumere was a little disheartening. The islands ticked off so quickly. There goes Flores and Sumbawa. They announced our descent over Lombok and then we landed in Denpasar. It tended to trivialize our task. Looking at maps does the same thing. Earf is big.

Kuala Lumpur is very cool if a little small for an asian city. Just a few million people. It's pretty compact, but doesn't feel that crowded. After the third world atmosphere of eastern Flores, Kuala Lumpur is like Astroland Moonbase 7, home of the clean ones. Then we went to KLCC the fancy mall at the base of the Petronas towers. Chanel, Bulgari, etc. Fi and I fairly tripped the light fantastic around it's stunning 7 floors of capitalistic, materialistic paradise. We pretty much spent the whole day drooling on western goodies, drooling on western food (then eating it), drooling on Cuban cigars (haven't smoked 'em yet), and then drinking some real coffee to replenish our drool factories. Very nice.

We've spent the last couple days at an enormous park and museum/mosque complex to the west of the city center. We walked there yesterday. It's beautiful. The national mosque is unbelievably cool, but also very difficult to photograph. I'll have to buy a postcard if I can't manage to find a decent place to take a picture of it. We went to the Islamic art museum today which was really fantastic. Tons of calligraphy and swords and tapestries and uh.... boxes and you know. Islamic stuff. Actually the museum itself was really the coolest part. The architecture is really fantastic. There is a room with the most fantastic models of the world's coolest mosques as well. They were really well done recreations. They had a 1964 piece of the shroud that covers the Ka'ba's front door in Mecca (shit I forget what it's called). You know what I'm talking about. The black cube in Mecca that all muslims face when they're praying. That was pretty neat.

We went to the world's largest covered bird park after that. Very relaxing and fun. I've got some photos from there. I'll put them up now. We head south for Melaka tomorrow. Then we'll be back in K.L. a couple days after that. After that, well you'll see. I'll write about it later. High speed internet access is all over the place here so I'll have less opportunity to throw away priceless weeks worth of pictures. Send me your sympathy.

--Gabe

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Photos

Yellow Bird
Green plants.

Red Bird
Can you see the duck?

Blue Bird
Fancy hat

Comments

[Mum]

When do we see a photo of gabe. Fi you need to get hold of the camera. KL looks fantastic. Pleased you are enjoying it

[Bea]

beautful birds! beautiful fiona!