Malaysia Part 2 - KLCC

Wed 11th July

Decided to explore the city for a bit. Today was a shopping centre day because it was rainy and all you could do was stay indoors in a shopping mall.

There is a hop-on-hop-off bus that goes around KL city. It's 38ringgit a day (around AUD$12-13) which is a bit expensive for Malaysia but not so when you factor in the exchange rate. The bus is actually a bit slow and it takes around 2 1/2hrs to complete one loop. The advantage is that it brings you to all the tourist places of interest whereas public transport is a bit confusing and taxis might be expensive if you get caught in KL traffic (which is horrendous!!). The bus frequency is meant to be every half hour but is a little depedent on the traffic. The bus ticket is also valid for 24hrs so the time gets punched on your ticket so that if you but it in the late afternoon you can still use it the next morning.

There are quite a few places of interest. There is the Royal Palace but you can't go in. If you are lucky, you can witness the changing of the guard. Malaysia also has quite a few parks and nature reserves that would be really pretty but it was a pity that the weather was bad as I would have liked to wander around the orchid park.

Here are a couple of the stops on the hop-on-hop-off tour. I took these photos later when it wasn't bucketing down.

Little India

The old train station. This used to be the main station before they built KL Sentral

Petronas towers or Menara Petronas

Ended up at the Suria KLCC which is the shopping mall under the Petronas or twin towers. I think the mall is mainly for tourists. There are lots of American, English, European and Australian brands sold here. Again, I am guessing that the things at this mall are too expensive for the locals.

The towers are impressively tall and were the tallest in the world until 2004. There is a sky bridge joining the two towers. Tourists are allowed to go up to the sky bridge but they start issuing tickets at 9am. Apparently there is usually a long queue and even if you get tickets, you might not get up there until quite a bit later. They also only let you have 10 minutes on the bridge. My opinion is the towers are best admired from afar.