Winter having come to Adelaide, we took to the skies again and flew north to Kuala Lumpur via Perth. We spent a day in the latter walking around the city centre including a long stroll through Kings Park, an excellent, sprawling botanical park with great views of the Perth skyline and the lake-like Swan River that winds through the city.Kuala Lumpur on our arrival was pleasantly warm and mercifully not too humid. After checking into a hotel in Chinatown in the city centre we made straight for the nearby food stalls stocked with the best food in the world, a medley and fusion of Malay, Indian and Chinese cuisines. We resolved to have only one substantial meal a day but all the spices, smells and sizzles easily overpowered that notion. And the tropical fruits are in abundance – rambutans, pawpaw, mangosteens, lychees, jack fruit, dragon fruit, longan, mangoes, bananas and pineapples to name a few.
There’s a lot to see in and around Kuala Lumpur, including:
* Merdaka Square that contains the best collection of colonial-style buildings in the city. A well-manicured cricket field in the centre of the Square now marks the spot where on 31 August 1957, Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman declared Malaysia an independent nation after centuries of foreign meddling and colonial rule. KL thus became the nation’s capital 100 years after its own first settlement as a tin exploration shantytown by Chinese prospectors and Indian labourers. A lot’s changed since then – KL is now a developed, modern, green city with plenty of gleaming high rise and tangled expressways.
* Petronas Twin Towers, the headquarters of the state-owned oil company that tower over the city and the enormous shopping centre beneath. These grand, elegant buildings sited on what was once the Selangor Turf Club stand 452 metres high and were until recently the tallest in the world.
* The nearby 420 metre high KL Menara communications tower with a fantastic 360 degree view over the city and across to the Petronas buildings.
* KL Bird Park, the largest walk-in free-flight bird park in the world, home to over 3,000 birds of 200 local and foreign species including fabulous hornbills, macaws and toucans.
* The beautiful blue Shah Alam mosque and Islamic educational centre west of the city. The mosque can accommodate 24,000 worshippers.
* Satellite city of Putrajaya 25 km to the south, established 10 years ago as Malaysia’s federal administrative centre. It features impressive government buildings and the rose-tinted granite Putra Mosque.
We caught up with Lee Tuan’s sisters and brother and respective families who live in KL and they showed us some of the sights in and around the city while keeping us well-fed with great Malaysian food. KL is a tourist-friendly, multicultural place and as a result attracts tourists from everwhere, further adding to its appeal. There would be few better places in South-east Asia to spend a few days than KL.
