Kuala Lumpur and brief stopover in Singapore

Asia
September 11th 2009

Published: September 11th 2009

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Gemma and Stephen

Kuala Lumpur

Petronas Towers at night

The easiest was to get to Kuala Lumpur was to fly from Phuket, and thanks to Air Asia it was the cheapest option too. We were back in sightseeing and culture mode and it was straight into the busy and exciting city of Kuala Lumpur. We managed to find a B&B centrally and close to the Monorail line which made getting around easy. Straight away we could see that Kuala Lumpur was different from the other cities we had been to in SE Asia, a little more ‘westernised’ than we were used to. Public transport was cheap and efficient, more accessible, and of a greater variety. Sightseeing suddenly became very much of a do it yourself affair as it was easier to get around whereas elsewhere we had been organising all-inclusive day tours from our hotel and getting hired transport everywhere such as taxi’s and mopeds.

All we had to do was walk out of our B&B and we were right in the thick of things, less than 50 metres from the nearest Monorail station Bukit Bintang. We spent our three days here zipping around to all corners of the city on the LRT & Monorail.

We saw

Kuala Lumpur

Us at the bird santuary. (Luckily I am used to having loads of birds flocking around me.... I wish.)

the Petronas towers and managed to get ourselves two free tickets to go up to the skybridge. This was well worth it; interesting, informative and some pretty sweet views from bridge as well. We went up the KL Tower, the fourth tallest communications tower in the world. We had some fantastic views of the city where we were 276m above ground, 100m higher than the skybridge of the Petronas towers.

We also walked around Chinatown, went to Merdeka square (where Malaysia declared its independence from Great Britain) and spent half a day at the KL bird park, the largest aviary in Asia. Everything we did was great but I think we enjoyed the bird park the most. We saw plenty of exotic birds and even managed a picture with some of them. Our last evening there we made our way back to the Petronas towers which are even more impressive at night time and we managed to get some great pictures.

After our time in KL we made a very brief visit to Singapore as Gemma’s sister Justine and her boyfriend Steve were flying in for one night from Australia before heading onto Bangkok. We made

Kuala Lumpur

The monorail

the most of this time and spent the evening catching up, exchanging stories and passing on any advice we could for their journey ahead, they in turn did the same for us as we in a few short weeks we would be in Australia. The following day we all found ourselves back in the airport, they were heading north to Thailand and we were heading east to Borneo for the final stretch of our Asian adventure.

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