The birds and the butterflies

Monday Febraury 25th

It ws slightly overcast this morning when I got up, so I decided it was better to do some outside stuff today as it wouldn't be as hot. So it was off to Lake Gardens, which I guess is KLs version of the Phoenix Park. It took me a while to get there, walking, as a lot of places are closed on Mondays, inclusing the way the girl at the tourist office pointed me. Yet another case of official directions not being that good. However in fairness to KL, there are a lot of signs showing directions to all the main sights, and they do seem to have the expectation that people will be walking to them. Its a much smaller city than Bangkok, and it is easier to get around on foot.

Lake Gardens has a number of attractions in it including the Orchid Gardens, Bird Park, Hibiscus Gardens, Butterfly Park, Sculpture Park and National Monument, all of which I went to see, and some others I didn't bother with. None of them were brilliant, but together they do provide a decent day out. I guess I was about 4 or 5 hours going around them all. The Orchid and Hibiscus (the national flower of Malaysia) gardens were free, so probably were best value, the Bird Park was a bit pricey (at M$35 - 7 Euro - which I mention only because the official city guide for Feb 2008 said it was M$28 - so thats a fair bit of inflation in bird food prices). And if you thought it was hard taking pictures of the birds, you could just forget about it in the Butterfly farm. Little (and some quite big) buggers won't stay still for photos. Very inconsiderate.

By now the cloud had cleared and it was beginning to get very hot, so I decided some indoor (or to be more accurate air conditioned) sights might be in order. So it was onto the monorail and off to the shopping centres.

Yes you heard right, this was via monorail. Unlike the skytrain in Bangkok, which was just a conventional train, one of the lines in KL is an actual monorail. Now some people say those things are awfully loud, but this glides silently as a cloud (compared to the other Skytrain here which is 2 railed and very noisy). And as for a chance that the track will bend, its reinforced concrete, so I'd say not a chance my (insert religion here) friend. And anyone who doesn't know what I'm on about needs to watch more Simpsons.

Anyway back to the shopping centres. Like Bangkok, there is a much pricier set of tourist hotels than the ones that I was staying in, and these are all in whats called the Golden Triangle, alongside all the main shopping centres. Again these are your usual SE Asian type shopping centres, unbelivably large. Some are like sort of markets with many small units, all selling similar stuff, others are filled with the western leading chains and labels.

However the big daddy of them all has to be Berjaya Time Square. This place is just enormous, with hundreds of shops, dozens of restaurants, a muti screen and IMAX cinema, an amusement park with roller coaster (all indoor) and good knows what else. My plan had been to go to dinner in the food court at the top though, but when I got there it was quite empty (a problem with being big is that it needs a lot of people to make you look busy). Being empty was an issue because instead of having the food cooked to order, the food was all out, and would be reheated on order. I wasn't having any of that, it could have been there since the day before.

So I went back down to one of the restaurants by the cinema. As you can guess there were McDonalds and Starbucks there, and the place I went to was basically a Malay food version of McDs. Or as I had chicken I guess KFC. But it did the job and was cheap.

After that I wandered around this area, popping into another big huge shopping centre, and of course walking past an Irish pub, so with the rule 'Never pass an Irish Bar' I had to pop in for a drink. (If anyone is keeping count it is number 12). This area seemed to be livelier in terms of nightlife than where I was staying but my feet were beginning to tire by now so I headed back to my hotel.

Which is where they informed me that my credit card had been rejected for my web booking. I couldn't figure out why, and we tried again on the local PIN code activated machine and luckily it still worked fine. So the hotel had no problem with me, but the websites are all against me. But it took me the rest of the night (and eventually the rest of the week) to get it sorted.