Kuala Lumpur

After several going away parties, my trip finally started at 1.30 a.m. on Wednesday 3^rd October 2007, when Dad and I set off for Dublin airport. By 9 a.m. I’d met up with Sean (who flew from Cork) in London Heathrow and by the next day we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, suffering from jet lag and a 7 hour time difference.

We got a taxi to our hotel, gathering some useful local information from our driver on the way. Our hotel was just down the road from the Twin Towers and the posh Suria KLCC shopping centre at their base.

On Friday (5^th Oct) we set off to the National Museum, followed by a walk around the Lake Gardens. When the heat got too much for us we went to the air-conditioned Planetarium, which is quite dated at this stage. Some of the reports were talking about planned missions in the late 1980’s… But it was much cooler than being outside! The humidity was very high. I managed to get a bit sunburned even with trying to avoid being outdoors for too long!

On Saturday we tried out the hop-on-hop-off bus tour round the city. We found a big boys toy shopping centre in Bintang – 6 floors of shops full of cameras, computers, phones and the likes. It took quite a while to get Sean out of there, and not without a dent in my credit card… When we went to leave, we discovered that it was pouring rain, which did a bit to help the humidity status thank goodness. We waited patiently for the bus again and had a quick look at China town before heading back to the hotel.

Sunday morning we got up early and rushed to the Twin Towers to get our free tickets to go up to the Skybridge. While the towers are both 88 floors high, the public can only go to the bridge between them, which is at floor 41. It’s still a great view, and who can complain about something that’s free! As we were already enjoying the view from up high, we then went to KL Tower, the communications tower, and got a full view of the city from ???m. We decided to treat ourselves a bit and had lunch in the revolving restaurant on the floor above the observation level. Tasty food and, once you could find your table again after going to pick something up from the buffet in the not revolving middle bit, very enjoyable! Next stop was the Aquarium before we collapsed in a tired heap again!

On Monday we felt like a bit of a change and went to the Sunway Lagoon on a tour organised by the hotel. We had great craic on the water slides and roller coasters, saw two gorgeous Bengal tigers and other animals, and of course, both got sunburned a bit due to forgetting to top up our sunscreen. I think we were slightly distracted by the water slides…

Tuesday 9^th October we packed our bags again and headed to KL airport. Another long flight later and we landed in Auckland, New Zealand!