Day 70 – 3/25 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

This was one of those ports that is “industrial.” We had about a 1-1/4 hour bus ride into Kuala Lumpur. We booked the ship’s tour that was essentially a bus ride into the center city, then planed the day’s activities on our own.

The “destination lecturer” who covered the history said that Malaysia (and Singapore) are amazing for how little we hear about them. They are extremely culturally diverse. Malaysia has native Malaysians, Chinese, and Indian. The latter two groups were brought in by the British when Malaysia was a British colony. They were needed as workers to develop the mining and other businesses.

These 3 ethnic groups look different physically, speak different languages, and have different religions. Any one of these differences can and has caused racial problems in other countries, but these two have handled it well.

The other factor that this lecturer pointed out was how Malaysia and Singapore dealt with freedom from the British. Indonesia reacted by taking money from the wealthy in order to give to the poor. This destroyed economic incentive, so their economy languished. Malaysia and Singapore did not want to repeat this mistake, so they did not take money from the wealth, but instead focused on getting part of the economic growth to pull up the poor. They both have had strong economies.

When we got to town we spent a little time in the shopping district and attempting to get phone or phone-over-internet.

We next went to the KL (Kuala Lumpur) Bird Park. This is the largest free-flight walk-in aviary in the world. It has 21 acres under net. They had something like 3000 birds, including 200 species. We have several photos below.

Within this facility, we went into a parrot house. We seemed to be shooting a full-color remake of Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” They liked us a lot…of course, that was after we purchased the food for them. (Separate photos of this below.)

We then went to the Botanical Gardens. (This is for Kathleen’s Garden Club friends.) The special flowers were the hibiscus (their native flower) and orchids.

We ended the day back downtown. We had managed to get tickets to go up on the walkway to the Petronas twin towers. This walkway bridges two towers on the 44th floor of the 88 floor towers. It is the highest such walkway in the world.