First, I arrived in Kuala Lumpur and after about 24 hours of serious culture shock remembered what it's like to wear knee-length skirts in public and not get stared at constantly. Pretty nice!
First I went to Bukit Nanas, a small Forest Research place right in the middle of town. Here's me enjoying the orchid shed:
Here's the tiniest pineapple I've ever seen!
They had a nice little arboretum walk with lots of signs about the trees....I LOVE interpretive signage! There's definitely not enough in the world.....
Next I visited the butterfly gardens, which were really awesome. Here are a few photos of some of the butterflies:
The hatching cupboard--it's hard to see how awesome it was from the photo, but you'll just have to trust me
This is another photo of the hatching cupboard with a GIANT moth--it's at least 12 inches across. The big dead leaf-looking things behind it are more chrysalises (chrysali?) waiting to hatch. You can see the "normal" size chrysalis below it.
There was a lot more than just butterflies....a nice pond:
Lots of various reptiles--like albino softshell turtles!
And some regular turtles:
Of course lots of butterfly-friendly flowers:
Me enjoying the quiet, peaceful sanctuary within the big city:
Then they had a really awesome insect museum inside....so many insanely big bugs!! I put my hand in this photo for scale--you could see it breathing which was really cool--it's whole abdomen was doing an accordion-like motion.
here's a giant horned beetle on a pineapple slice for scale--Yikes!
Also a huge room with all the walls covered with pinned insects. I won't bore you with the all the photos I took, but here's the nicest display:
It's hard to see how big this was--the frame of this photo is probably 8 feet by 4 feet.....HUGE.After the butterfly garden, I went to the orchid park which was conveniently right across the street. Again, I won't bore you with all the photos I took of the orchids, but this was the most interesting.
Here's me very happy to be surrounded by landscaping and flowers:
And here's my attempt at taking an artfully-framed photo of flowers in the foreground and the two very famous towers in the background...unfortunately it was quite stormy this afternoon and it's hazy, so you really have to look for the towers:
There's also a hibiscus garden attached to/party of the orchid garden. The hibiscus is the national flower of Malaysia--
Me next to a hibiscus--there were so many flowers on this bush I don't understand how there was only one that got into the photo frame....
And again, another GIANT insect and nothing to really give scale to the image (I would estimate the bug to be at least 3 inches long), but there were tons of these really beautiful hanging flowers and a whole bunch of these HUGE buzzing bee-things crawling into them and getting nectar. These insects were not on display and not behind glass! They were really cute and I watched them for a long time--they would crawl all the way into the flower, drink some nectar and then struggle to back out.
There's also a really great (supposedly) bird aviary in the same giant park. It's a bit pricey to get in and I didn't have enough cash that afternoon, but there is a restaurant that overlooks the aviary, so I ate lunch on the deck and saw quite a few really awesome birds anyway. Not sure what this first one is, but it was enormous.
And a big hornbill, too!
A very nice city for gardens and nature for being a big metropolis!
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