KL 1 of 5: Intro and the Aquarium

We recently spent a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I should point out that here Kuala Lumpur is referred to as KL. I kept hearing people discuss KL but I at first I assumed it was part of Indonesia, and would turn out to be spelled Keyelle or similar. Finally someone used Kuala Lumpur and KL in the same sentence and the light bulb went on in my head. I finally got it! When we were looking for a short get-away, we decided on KL. KL is an easy 1.5 hour flight from Jakarta.

How did we get there? B was in Singapore for a meeting earlier in the week. The day B flew back here, Oky brought me to the airport about the same time B was to land. As B exited Immigration and Customs he called me. We were just pulling in to park. When Oky found a spot, he unbuckled his seatbelt and hopped out of the car saying he was going to move a car. I assumed he was going to ask the driver to move a car that was parked in the driving lane and was partially blocking the spot he wanted. I was sooooo wrong. When Oky said he was going to move the car, that's what he meant. As I looked out, he walked to the back of the car and pushed it forward to clear the parking spot. We parked and walked towards the airport. Oky and I met B, he handed Oky his Singapore suitcase and took the KL bag we had brought with us. Then we headed into the airport and Oky headed back to the apartment to leave the suitcase with Bu Tin.  When we got home, Tin had unpacked B's suitcase, done the laundry and folded and put everything away.

On to KL.

One of our stops was the KL Aquarium. It was very nice and had good signage. There were a lot of staff photographers wanting to stage us in front of backgrounds or blue screens but we managed to evade them all. A lot of the creatures we'd seen before, but there were new things and interesting exhibits.

Here are just a few of the photos we took. Cute piranha tank.

A major focus of this aquarium was sharks. This did include educational information about not eating shark fin soup, etc., with a strong conservation message. It is a delicacy in SE Asia. But they also had the traditional shark stuff.

Shark species exhibited here included sand tiger shark, tawny nurse shark, white-tip reef shark, shovelnose ray (also known as guitarfish)- pictured above. There was a very slow moving walk through shark tunnel but the lighting made it really difficult to get good photos.

Other areas included a rocky shore touch pool, an electric zone with  electric eels, electric catfish and elephant nose fish and a stream exhibit which included an Asian small-clawed otter area. This exhibit was lifted up and under the exhibit you could crawl around and pop up into acrylic domes right in the middle of the exhibit. Guess who tried it out?

One of my favorite spots was the Malaysian Deep Forest. The backgrounds painted on the walls were gorgeous! I'd love to paint something like this on one of my office walls...

 This was the cutest cartoon rendition of a lionfish I've ever seen:

A fun tube tank!

They had an area discussing the extinct megaladon shark (I should point out there are some people who think they are not quite yet extinct). Just a little taxonomy: sharks are in the cartilagenous fish class Chondrichthyes, in the subclass Elasmobranchi. The megalodon lived 15.9 to 2.6 million years ago (unless you believe they are still around). There isn't a lot of fossil evidence because they are mostly built of cartilage. Only teeth and a few central vertebrae have been found. The teeth can be 7 inches in height. Max length might be 59 feet or even larger. Some numbers I've seen give these examples: a 52 foot long megalodon might have weighed 48 metric tons; a 67 foot megalodon might have hit 103 metric tons. The megalodon is believed to have resembled a great white, only stockier, but the megalodon potentially could have swallowed a great white whole.B gives a size comparison.