Day 60 - Leaving Kuala Lumpur for Auckland...

An update from the city of the big towers...

We've gone from the squalor/poverty of India to the complete consumer paradise (depending on your point of view) of Kuala Lumpur. We decided to stay in the city for our 5 short days here (a good choice given that the 1st one was spent catching up on sleep after the flight from Mumbai!) - but we've found enough to keep us entertained in this hot, humid, busy but completely excellent city. There's even a very weird plant-fountain that looks awful...

As you can see from some of the pics, KL is home of the famous Petronas Twin Towers - a mighty impressive sight they are, both from the ground and from the skybridge (a rather disappointing 146m up in the air). We queued for an hour to get the earliest tickets and the view from the bridge was fantastic - not a sign of the smog that so choked Delhi and some of the other Indian cities.

One of the other famous attractions here is the Batu Caves, just north of the city. To be honest, we were a little disappointed with them - there are more impressive caves at Dan-yr-Ogof but to us non-Hindus it wouldn't have had the religious significance they do for Hindus. Millions of ppl come here in February to take part in a festival and stick pins in themselves for good measure. It was a little quieter when we visited but we still had the (relatively mild) torture of climbing over 200 steps in the pouring rain to get to the caves... Here's Em at the top, looking suitably knackered.

The big golden guy is Murugan, one of the sons of Shiva - a pretty bad dude, especially with his big golden spear.

So KL...there are so many shops here it's unbelievable..just everywhere but the transport system is so good (loads of metros, trains and a monorail), it's a joy to get around. The food is wonderful, every conceivable style - there's a fantasic butterfly farm with (thankfully) dead specimens of the spiders found in the highlands of Malaysia. Needless to say I won't be visiting - the biggest one was as big as my hand and had a really nasty look on his face (though, he had been pinned to a display board for some time).

We had the good fortune to think ahead while we were in Agra and book a table at the revolving restaurant at the top of the KL Tower (not the Petronas Towers, the KL Tower is a communications tower). The resturant is at nearly 300m so we were way above the skybridge we'd been at earlier in the day. It was a wonderful experience and we managed to go round completely twice in the two hours we were there - great food too. A bit expensive but I guess it costs a fair bit to get the food up to the tower (was perturbed to find a bottle of Freixenet Cava was 30ukp - a little steep?).

What was really weird was being served a bottle of Ty Nant water with our meal!

So, Emma should have finished the packing now and we have to check out soon...we're off around Chinatown to get some tasty snacks and catch a flight to Auckland at 9pm tonight (10 hours but with a bit of luck it will be a 747 so there'll be plenty of room).

Hope UK isn't too cold, I guess you could say we're on our way home now (in a way...).

Looking forward to some camping and gawping at waterfalls and lakes in NZ (along with a bit of bungee jumping if Em lets me).

:)