Putrajaya Day Trip

About 20 miles south of KL is a city called Putrajaya.  It's a planned city designed to house the prime minister's office and several other government offices.  While the main parliament building is still in KL, a lot of the actual government work is done in Putrajaya.  On the weekends though, it's a beautiful garden city without many inhabitants, so last Saturday, we hired a van and driver, invited some friends, and went to check it out.

The city is defined by a man-made lake, and it can be accessed by one of seven bridges.  We started out on the "sailboat" bridge, where our driver parked to one side and let us take pictures looking towards the famous "pink" mosque.

When we were farther away, Jeff got a picture of the bridge that shows where the name came from.

Next, we drove to the large circle which is in front of the Prime Minister's office and the Pink Mosque.  There is parking all around, and we were early enough to be able to snag a spot.

We started by checking out the offices, which were huge.

There's a lovely landscaped park between the offices and the mosque, so we also took some time to explore those.

The girls and I stayed up in the top part of the park, and Jeff and one of our friends walked down to the water to get this cool picture of the mosque.

They're using this period of relatively few tourists to do maintenance, which means we'll have to come back when it's done.

We walked around the front of the mosque, but unfortunately, it's still closed to visitors, so we weren't able to go inside and the see the interior of the dome, which is too bad, because it's supposed to be beautiful.

We did get lucky on one thing though, the day we were visiting was the first day that they reopened the boat tours around the lake, so we went down to the pier as soon as it opened to buy our boat tickets.

We selected the private, six person boat, instead of the big cruise, so we had to wait a while for our turn.  Luckily, there was a cool, nautical themed playground that Jeff took Elena to play on.

Viv and I found a store that sold "elephant" pants and some cute dresses, so we had fun shopping, and Viv had enough time to change into one of her new pairs of pants before we set off on our boat trip.  We walked across a bridge to a special pier.

Then it was on to the boat.

There was a great breeze on the water, and we had about 30 minutes of sailing around and looking at things.  We got to see another cool bridge.

There were also a large number of people just relaxing in and around the water.  Most of the land around the lake is public park, and there was a place where you could rent kayaks or these funny little boats that looked like old fashioned cars, which we figured must be electric or something, because the people inside them didn't seem to be exerting any effort.

We also sailed by the prime minister's house, which is across the lake from his office.  He's got quite a nice set up.

As we were coming back towards the pier, we got a good view of the sailboat bridge and the monument and metal mosque on the other side of it.

I asked our guide why the monument looked like a missile.  His response was that all monuments look like missiles and rockets.  I see where he's coming from, but this was definitely not an obelisk. 

Our final sighting was the Sultan of Selangor's residence, which we all agreed looked like a girls' boarding school.

Malaysia has a really interesting system of monarchy.  There are nine states in Malaysia that are headed by Muslim, Malay rulers.  Every five years, one of them is "elected" by the other monarchs to serve as the head monarch for the country, or Agong, as the position is often referred to in news stories.  Our guide explained that it is basically a rotation, and only one monarch has actually served twice.  It seems like a compromise that has worked pretty well.

When our boat tour was done, we returned to the main pier building and met back up with our driver/guide.

He took us to our next stop, the Palace of Justice.  This is where people get their last chance to ask for a pardon, usually for a death sentence offense.  Jeff got a good picture of it from across the street.

I was a little worried about him crossing this big boulevard, but there really wasn't much traffic.

He crossed to get a picture of the I heart Putrajaya sign and the intricate steel building.

Our guide explained that the steel in the city is largely financed by the Chinese.  I wasn't clear if he was referring to the Chinese Malaysians or the Chinese government, but when he took us to the next bridge, he was clear that it had been sponsored by Iran.  It definitely had some Muslim flair, but I thought the gold wreaths on the side looked very French.

On the other side of the bridge, on top of a hill, is the convention center.  We drove up there next and got a good view looking down.

We stopped by the metal mosque, but it was also closed to visitors, and it was hard to take pictures from in front of it, so we drove over to a park near the rocket monument to get a better view.  We parked in an area that seemed to be a small fairground in better times.  There was some interesting art, and advertisements for rides that weren't open.

We did get closer to the monument though and were able to see that it was covered in carvings.

Jeff also got a good picture of the mosque across the water.

The girls had stopped getting out of the air conditioned van a few stops back, and so they were happy to hear that this was our last stop and we were heading back to KL.  It did get quite hot towards the end, but I'm glad we got to Putrajaya and explored it a bit.  We're getting to know our new country better, and that goes a long way towards making us feel at home here.