I am a bit hungover, but get up to get a pizza with JC before we visit the KL Tower. The pizza I have would be great except for the beef pepperoni being too fatty and salty. JC’s is a caper pizza which I have a bit of, and with everything else being near perfect, it’s competing with the one I had in Siem Riep….9/10 (loss of at least half a mark for the pepperoni).
To the KL Tower, which is the one with the disc near the top and, with an antennae that reaches 421m high, is still the second tallest telecommunications tower in the world. I don’t feel entirely comfortable with heights, and I haven’t been on a flight for about a decade, unless you count a 25 minute flight from Heathrow to the Isle of Wight and back again as a bit of failed therapy. However, as we go up the elevator I feel like I am taking off and getting out on the observation floor, I can’t help feeling that buildings really weren’t meant to be this high. 421 metres may not seem that high when you say it, but it bloody is when you get up there. I keep expecting aircraft to fly by the window. I get JC to get my picture to prove I made it and get back in the elevator to go down within thirty seconds of getting out, leaving him up there to feel the building wobble.
While the KL Tower does have a communications purpose, the site of it has been constructed as a tourist attraction with fenced grounds. There is a revolving restaurant in the upper part of the building, but I think it would get messy if I tried to eat there. At the bottom though is a kind of amusement park, with a small zoo of exotic animals, like an albino python. Other animals there though are quite easy to see roaming about out in the cities of south-east Asia, so I just feel sorry for these being locked in cages. Indeed there are a couple of monkeys in the zoo, and I am sure that the ones that I saw stealing someone’s ice cream off the table in the café while I waited for JC to come back down the tower were having a much better life.
Besides the zoo, there are a handful of incongruous activities to take part in. There’s somebody offering donkey rides, but the rain is starting up, so this isn’t popular. JC and I have a go in some F1 simulators, but they are set in child mode so are too easy (we both come first) and might have seemed technically exciting when the Tower opened in 1996, but have been somewhat overtaken by simulator advances.
After my cowardice up the tower, I am not keen on visiting the even taller Petronas Towers. Anyway, the rain really starts pouring down, so we catch a taxi back to the hostel. We end the day drinking beer on the hostel balcony lounge, and playing ‘Name That Tune’ on my kazoo late into the night, possibly annoying other guests.
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| entirely relaxed... |
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