Kuala Lampur – a day in KL
Saturday, 06-Dec-2014
Tags: Travel
I (Larry) have been in Kuala Lumpur all week on business with no time for sightseeing. I have been staying at a hotel right at KL Sentral (central railway station) since it is only five minutes from where I was working. But this isn’t a very interesting area. There are some office buildings, a very large train station, and a new upscale shopping mail (Nu Sentral). The area is adjacent to Brickfields which is (according to Wikipedia) "is a small to medium-sized town and residential neighbourhood (as well as an administrative zone) located just outside central Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is known as Kuala Lumpur's Little India due to the high percentage of Indian residents and businesses."
Today (Saturday) is my last day here and I had all day to myself since my plane to Seoul is very late tonight, so I had some time to do some sightseeing. Since my preferred mode of sightseeing is on foot, I don’t get to see that many things (my trusty iPhone says that I have walked 8.5 miles today so I guess it was a success). I did avail myself of a couple of taxis and the local commuter rail, however. I took a lot of pictures and only include a few of them in the blog.
My first stop was the Petronas (Twin) Towers. These were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004 (fame is always so fleeting). Needless to say, they were impressive buildings.
I walked around the area a bit — not much going on really — and then walked to the KL Tower since it was the other obvious thing that I saw when I looked up.
After going back to my hotel to checkout I did the most interesting thing of the day, I went to the KL Bird Park. This was just one stop on the local rail line to the “old” railway station (as you can see in the following picture, this is a pretty impressive looking building although the inside is in pretty rough shape).
From the station is was a bit more than a km to the Bird Park past the National Mosque and the National Planetarium.
The KL Bird Park is a huge enclosed aviary — the world’s largest free-flight walk-in aviary. The admission price is 48 ringets (a bit under $15). All I can say is that it is an amazing place and should definitely be on your itinerary if you make it here. Many of the birds are walking around loose with the people. Some of the rarer (or more dangerous) birds are in large caged in areas. I have included a bunch of bird pictures below. The Bird Park was separated into zones and between zones you had to go through a set of double doors, like an airlock, so that the birds don't migrate or get loose. As you can see, many of the birds are just wandering around interacting with the people!
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Larry and Eileen Samberg
