South East Asia

Our recent trip to South East Asia took us briefly to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), then 12 days in Vietnam and finally a couple of days in Hong Kong. This post covers Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. I’ll blog more fully on Vietnam in the days to come.

We spent a lot of time eating and drinking, or thinking about eating and drinking. Jenny has photos of every interesting meal she consumed. She is threatening to post these on some accessible web site – details when I have them.

The most photogenic place we visited in Kuala Lumpur was the Bird Park. It boasts the world’s largest walk in aviary and there were certainly a lot of birds getting up close to the human visitors. I didn’t manage to identify a lot of the species so here are a selection of the exhibits with my best guess if I’m not sure.

Toucan.

No idea on this one but I love its slightly demented look.

Some sort of stork.

Pelican.

Scarlet ibis

This is the old railway station in Kuala Lumpur, built by the British in an Arabic style.

 At the museum there were a couple of steam locomotives.

 There is a working monorail – one line on the city’s suburban passenger network.

Hong Kong also has a very good public transport system – a combination of buses, trains, trams (the only all double decker fleet in the world)

and ferries. We stayed on Lantau Island and took this fast ferry to Hong Kong Island.

This was where we stayed - the Silvermine Beach Resort.

We visited the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery. If you ever visit it beware of the false monks who take you through an elaborate welcoming ceremony and then con you out of a few dollars. There were notices warning us of the practise, but only higher up the path after we had encountered the tricksters.

Finally, Kathy joined us on her way back to the UK. She was ferried around in this two person tricycle.