The blue mosque at Shar Alam
We took a bus into Kuala Lumpur early morning, as we were docked at Port Kelang, about an hour from the big city. We stopped at the blue mosque at Shar Alam, the mosque was built about 10 years ago, I was disappointed that we couldn’t get closer to it but even from a distance it was a impressive.
Royal Palace guard
Our tour continued with a visit to the Royal Palace where the current king lives, Malaysia is a democratic kingdom with a sultan for each of the nine provinces, every 5 years the sultans elect a new king from their numbers and he holds the position ‘til the next one is elected. The palace is a former private residence and has two mounted cavalrymen guarding the entrance, nice horses. Next we visited the Museum Negara with various artefacts from Malaysia’s past and a nice little orange cat. On the museum grounds you can still see a bust of King Edward the seventh, a leftover from Malaysia’s British colonial past and , of course, an impressive statue of the well known diplomat Sir Frank Swettenham.
War monument
Our next stop brought us to the National War Monument, commemorating those lost in battle, it is divided into 3 separate sections, the first world war, the second world war and the internal conflict of the 1950’s. We walked through the surrounding gardens, before moving off to our next destination, downtown KL, where we saw stopped at the former cricket grounds, site of the signing ceremony of Malaysian independence from Great Britain. Then we were off to visit the KL tower, not the Petronas Towers, but nevertheless high enough to provide a good overview of the city. I was hungry, so I was happy with our next stop, lunch at the federal Hotel, (oink oink) a buffet with a million people crowding in to get a spoonful of rice and a bit of meat. You might have guessed, I didn’t like it, but I did get my own bowl of gruel, so at least it wasn’t as bad as the restaurants in China.
After lunch, we stopped at a craft outlet, expensive but some nice stuff, then a quick photo stop for a picture of the Petronas Towers and then we were back at the ship, spending our remaining Malaysian money, 65 ringit, on bags of chips and bars of chocolate. In general, I liked KL, it had a good feel about it, we didn’t get to meet many locals but those we did meet seemed friendly.
The blog’s a bit short today as I’m not feeling too well, there’s some kind of respitory infection going round and it looks like it’s my turn. In addition, Princess has made an unauthorised charge of $8637.42 from my credit card and it’s next to impossible to see anyone capable of explaining how it’s going to be fixed. We called our credit card company and they say that even if we dispute it they can’t change it without filling in several forms.
