Kuala Lumpur the capital of Malaysia

I had been taking my time reading the guidebook on Malaysia and figured I would be really prepared with what I wanted to do and see once I went there. The problem with this is that I thought I would have a few more weeks in Thailand and only made it through the sections of the guidebook on food, history and culture. I had not started the specifics on what there was to see and do so had not done any planning on where I wanted to go while in Malaysia. Well this is really the way I have been traveling since China so I am sort of use to this but I just thought Malaysia would be different. The flight to Kuala Lumpur went well and I was on a really cheap Air Asia flight that was not even half full. I don’t know how this airline can be making any money when I am use to flying on airlines like United or KLM that are jam packed and charge 3 times as much and seem to talk all the time about losing money. Immigration on arrival was simple and I received a 3 month visa on arrival. It is nice to have such a long visa even though I don’t intend to use it. I still hoped to return to Thailand so went to the Thai Embassy in Kuala Lumpur 3 times. The visa was really simple to get just took some time and one trip was just to read the sign outside the embassy of the times to apply for a visa. I also made 3 trips to the Petronas Towers which is the 2nd Tallest Building in the World and the largest twin buildings in the world. The first time I went there were no tickets to go up in the tower, the 2nd to receive a ticket and then I returned six hours later to go up in the tower at my ticket time. This is a picture of the towers.

The ticket allowed me to go up to the sky bridge between the 41st floors of the 2 buildings but I found it a bit disappointing. After being on the 91st floor of the world’s largest building in Taipei a couple of months ago the 41st floor just does not compare. This is a picture of the park behind the building from the sky bridge.

While in Kuala Lumpur I also did the 2 walking tours that my guidebook had and one of the things I found interesting in Kuala Lumpur is the different people. There are a lot of people descended from India, China and of course Malaysia so the city seems to have a real strange mix of different cultures. I was never sure if I was eating Indian, Chinese or Malay food. I did try lychees which I had been wanting to try so now know the difference between a Rambutan and a Lychee. This is my lychee picture.

The things that I enjoyed the most while in Kuala Lumpur were visiting the butterfly and bird parks. I did this on 2 different days and really enjoyed both of them. You can look on my webpage for all the pictures of birds and butterflies but here is a picture of 2 birds with a turkey in the middle.