The evening of Christmas Day 2009, we took a train ride from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. This is a side trip in our week-long vacation in Singapore. At first we have planned for just a day’s visit by going back and for on the same day but we decided to book on a hotel instead and stay overnight since our baby Janine will be coming with us. We don’t want her getting too tired and we worry on keeping her feeding bottles clean.
And so like I have always done in my past visits to the city, I booked ourselves on the midnight departure on board the KTM train that departs Singapore at 10pm for KL Sentral. This time we got sleeper berths instead of the usual seats since it may be uncomfortable for Janine when goes to sleep. We got upper sleepers when I booked online as the lower sleepers got booked fast. So when we got on board I tried to ask the guys on the lower sleeper if we can exchange. Luckily they agreed to exchange with us so we traveled on a lower sleeper while we put our bags on the upper sleeper. There was not enough space so the three of us stayed on the lower sleeper.
The Twins of Kuala Lumpur
Petronas Tower 1
The Petronas SkyBridge
Petronas and Maxis Tower
With sad hearts, we thought that we’ll try again tomorrow to go up the SkyBridge. So while we’re still in KLCC, we walked to the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center where the Aquaria KLCC is located. Aquaria is KL’s version of an oceanarium and we wanted to see it also for Janine. Unfortunately we arrived too early as the park opens at 10:30am, so we had to wait for sometime.
And so, we were among the first people to get into Aquaria that morning. It was a different oceanarium though it had the regular touching pools and big tanks of ocean and fresh water creatures, it also had amphibians and reptiles in their upper section. They even had this exhibit item that features the transformation of frogs from eggs to tadpoles up to the actual frog.
Aquaria KLCC
Aquaria Entrance
A Python
Reptile area of Aquaria
Amazon Flooded Forest section of Aquaria
a Spherical Tank
Jen and Janine at the Aquaria walkthrough Aquarium
Inside the walkthrough Aquarium
Creatures of the Deep in Aquaria
At the lower section, it had a big spherical tank of fishes that seems to originate in a mangrove forest. While beside is another tank of fishes. This area is basically themed as the Amazon Flooded Forest which also featured the giant fishes like Arapaimas. At another lower section, is their main attraction which is a walk through tank that features sharks, rays, and other fishes of the deep. This is very much similar with the Underwater World of Sentosa but I think Sentosa’s is a lot better as Aquaria has very obvious fake corals though it had more sharks and rays.
After that, we had lunch before heading to our hotel in Melia Kuala Lumpur which is located along Jalan Imbi and across the Berjaya Times Square. The good thing on this hotel is that it has the Imbi station of the Monorail just in front of it. But the sad thing is that the monorails only had stairs and just a single escalator going up. It was very hard for us because we had Janine on the stroller plus all our bags with us and it was terrible. This was a very negative point of the Kuala Lumpur MRT system compared to Singapore’s which is very comfortable that is easy for people with strollers.
Imbi Monorail Station in Front of Melia KL
Berjaya Times Square
That afternoon, we no longer went anywhere else because unfortunately it rained. But it was good anyways because we had time to rest. Oh but before the rain went down, I had time to go to Puduraya Bus Station to buy our bus tickets the next day for Singapore on board Eltabina Express. And that night, we just went across the street to just have dinner in Berjaya Times Square before retiring for the night.
The next morning, we once again tried our chance to go up the SkyBridge, but once again we did not arrive there on time because we were once again not given the chance to fall in line, until we were told that there were more tickets to be given that day but it would probably be in the afternoon. We opted not to stay there longer anymore since our bus ride going back to Singapore is at 1:30pm. And so, we just decided into buying somethings at the Berjaya Times Square before having lunch and getting ready for our trip back to Singapore. And this time, I was awake all the way so I was able to see the road from KL to Tuas to Singapore. The bus trip ends at Jalan Sultan near North Bridge Road.