On the tour in Kuala Lampur

Celebrating Independence

If you are a KLite, you are a resident of the most populous city in Malaysia, and you’re probably one of three major ethnic groups: the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians. However, the city also has a mix of Eurasians, Kadazans, Ibans, and other indigenous Malaysian races. To me this makes the city even more interesting. There are all sorts of cultural areas, foods, events and shopping to sample without ever leaving the city. But to sample some of the things we hadn’t seen in the city, we hired a guide and took off on a short adventure!

On the Bus in Kuala Lumpur

I’ve always said that travel was an adventure, but as to getting there

Petronas Towers

being half the fun…in this case, not so much. Our adventure began with an announcement from out pilot, ‘We have a mechanical issue and we’re landing in Tokyo rather than Hong Kong’. What followed was several hours of bus rides, getting into a hotel room and ‘making do’ with toiletries they provided, finding our luggage, hunting for the next plane, and finally getting to our destination too late to make the first excursion I had planned. However, I was grateful that the pilot made the choice to take care of the mechanical issue rather than flying to Hong Kong with a plane full of people who had been exposed to human waste for more hours than absolutely necessary. So once I was in Kuala Lumpur, my plans had to change, and that’s absolutely what’s expected when one is having an adventure.  I first wrote about KL in 2014 (see Flying around in Kuala Lumpur); I learned a lot more about it on this trip.

Flying around in Kuala Lumpur

Whale sculpture

I wish that I’d had a good deal more time to spend in Kuala Lumpur. The cultural and gastronomical diversity simply cannot be sampled in the couple of days I got to spend in this remarkable city.

Like Singapore, this city replete with public transportation. The light rail gave us access to most parts of the city while taxi service took us to places we simply couldn’t figure out how to get to with our maps. My two favorite places for taking photographs were the KL Butterfly Park and the Bird Park. Both of these parks were quite a bit larger than I had anticipated and were surprisingly open. In the butterfly park we wandered down trail after trail of blooming plants with literally