Sunway Lagoon
Yesterday I went to Malaysia's largest amusement park with my friend Siti, who gets Fridays off because she works with clients in the Mid-East. I caught the local commuter train to the station nearest the park and she picked me up there. Day passes are normally RM60 but available for RM48 to those in possession of a MyKad, the biometric ID cards issued to all Malaysian citizens. Siti used her MyKad to buy two passes and handed me one without eliciting any suspicions.
Because Friday is a workday in Malaysia, the park was shockingly empty. I'd never seen an amusement park that empty before. Most of those there seemed to be foreign tourists. We noticed a large number of arabs, many of whom rivalled Midwesterners in obesity. While it was lovely to be spared endless queues, at one point we had to cajole other people into going on a ride with us because they operators wouldn't run it unless at least four people wanted to ride!
The park is divided into several different sections and the regular pass that we'd bought only allowed us the use of four of them but we figured that would be more than sufficient for a single day. After jamming all our stuff into a locker for which we were charged per opening, we hit up the Wild West section, where somewhat cheesy country music was blaring constantly. After a while I had an urge to throw a lasso around something and shout "yee-haw".
That seemed like a good time to get wet at the water park. I've always enjoyed water parks but the hot Malaysian sun made it even more enjoyable than usual. At one point, unfortunately, I scraped my foot against a metal protrusion in the wooden platform of a ride and it started bleeding. I was concerned about it getting infected so Siti found a store that sold band-aids and I put a couple of them on to protect the wound. Once we'd had our fill of water rides, we went to the fake beach. I'd never seen a fake beach before and was quite taken by it. They had real sand and people were even playing volleyball on it!
While we were in the water there, I noticed a impressively long suspension bridge stretching across above us so we went in search of it. It turned out to be the longest pedestrian suspension bridge in the world and, unlike Vancouver's Capilano bridge, we didn't need to pay extra to walk across it. The bridge has metal grating along the centre so that we could look down through it as we walked along, which enthralled me and terrified poor Siti, who disclosed that she's afraid of heights. Despite that she walked across the bridge with me a second time so that we could ride a zipline across the fake beach.
After leaving the beach we stopped to admire the pair of tigers on display at the park. They weren't very animated at first but when it began raining heavily they picked their lazy asses of the ground and began to play in the water and walk around. But this was only a small consolation for the other effect of the rain: all the rides were shut down. While that prevented us from returning to a couple of our favourite rides or taking as any photos as I would have liked, it was also the first time in many years that I didn't mind getting wet in the rain, since I was suitably dressed for it.
