April 5, 2018 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
2018 Borneo tour
We leave this morning on a city tour of Kuala Lumpur, arriving at the KL Tower when it opens at 9:30AM, so there are no crowds. Our tour guide Susan waves off the photographers who normally take photos of everyone as they enter the elevator area. We go straight up to the Sky Deck, which offers open air viewing. This is much better for photography than the glassed-in deck I visited in 2016 when I was here on a Holland America shore excursion. There are also two Sky Boxes on this level, which are glass-floored boxes that extend out into the open air clear of the tower superstructure.
We make a stop at the Titiwangsa Lake Gardens for some very nice views of the Petronas Towers and the hospital district with the cityscape reflected in the lake. Our next stop is the Petronas Towers mall for lunch in the Signature Food Court on level 3. The food is cheap and good, but I have to eat quickly and get out of there to escape the noise and crowds.
We visit the highly ornate Thean Hou Chinese Buddhist temple, which presents us with lots of photo ops. By the time we get back on the bus, it is after 2PM and getting very hot outside. Some of our group are done for the day, however our tour leader Susan wants us to see two more sights before we return to the hotel. She proposes to finish the original tour, which includes a walk-about Chinatown and two more temples, but only for those in the group who want to go.
So we all go to see the Chan See Shu Yuen clan hall, which is very interesting, but only worth about 15 minutes, and then we go to nearby Merdeka Square, where there are lots of colonial era buildings, including an old English-era church and a cricket field. We cross the street and walk a block to the River of Life area, where two rivers meet and where the historic Masjid Jamek (Friday Mosque) is located.
Susan takes the group who want to see more off on their walkabout to Chinatown, while the rest of us (me included) are driven back to the hotel. I have a shower and a rest before we leave in the bus for a dinner and cultural show at Saloma (now called WoW KL) in the club district of the city. The cultural show is a high-energy affair, which highlights the multi-cultural milieu that makes up the country of Malaysia.