Today started with a visit to the nearby Petronas Twin Towers with their destinctive double-decker connecting bridge at the 42nd and 43rd floors. The towers are named after Petronas Gas Berhad, Malaysia's national petroleum company which occupies one of th towers as its head quarters. For those into F1 motor racing Petronas is one of the major sponsors of the Mercedes F1 team and this is reflected by the display of F1 racing cars in the foyer of the building. The visit to the towers, which included time seeing the bridge at the 42nd floor, the observation desck at the 85 floor and the souvenir shop at the 83 floor gave a great view of the greater KL area.

After the towers our guide and driver deposited us at another inner city nature park for a stroll along a very impressive canopy walk through the tops of some very tall tropical trees.

Thereafter we took a stroll through some of the interesting parts of the city starting at Independence Square a grassed field across the road from the original British Administration Buildings and next to the Royal Selangor Club which in colonial times was an exclusive meeting place for high ranking British officials.

The 8th photo in the group above is the location from which Kualar Lumpur gets its name. Kualar means something like "junction of two rivers" (which can be seen in the photo) and Lumpur means "muddy". KL is the junction of two muddy rivers. The mist in the rivers is water mist being expelled from piping arund the side of the river canals in an effort to offset the noon-time heat of KL and is similar to the misting that one finds in Phoenix AZ around restaurants and bars.

We spent some time visiting the oldest Chinese temple in KL.

As you can see from the captions on the remaining photos we spent some time at the entrance of the Kings Palace where we got a short lesson in the structure and political history of the Malaysian Government. Malaysia is organized into 13 states and 3 federal Territories and each has a head of state that is usually described as a Sultan with most of the states the Sultanate is inherited through a royal family. The Kingship of Malaysia is rotates between the various Sultans on a basis that I could not really work out. The King and the Sultans are a constitutional monarchy somewhat based on the British system. However from what I could learn from the guide the Malaysian Monarchy retains a good deal more real political power than the British Monarchy. The broader government of Malaysia is somewhat of a Westminster Parliametary system within each state but the names of the various roles are unique to Malaysia. For those interested in more details see this link.

The final photo was taken at the National Monument and is a tribute to those who fought the Japanese in WW11 and to Malay soldiers that died in The Malayan Emergency, a guerilla war between British Commonwealth forces and the Malayan Communist Party between the years 1948 and 1960.