A Walk in the Clouds

Going up to the Petronas Twin Towers is free-of-charge, but you still need to get tickets. There's only a limited number of tickets being issued per day, and they run out pretty fast. Last tour is at 4:30pm, and public access to the Towers is closed by 5pm.

I was expecting the ticket office to be somewhere within the Suria Shopping Center at the base of the towers, but it's actually at the lower level of Tower 2. I got there around 11:30am, and there's already a long queue of people, mostly foreign tourists. Good thing I managed to get myself into the 4:15pm batch.

Visitors are given a colour-coded pass to identify members of a batch. Then, we have to go through security checks and metal-detecting doors, just like those in the airports. While waiting for the others to come down, we were ushered into a theaterette where a short movie gives an introduction to the Petronas Towers. Intelligent building, an engineering marvel, 88-storey main towers, 44-storey annexes, 58.4-metre double-deck skybridge at levels 41 and 42, 452 metres in height, 65,000 sq. metres of stainless steel cladding, 77,000 sq. metres of vision glass, 160,000 cubic metres of concrete in the superstructure, 32,500 tonnes of reinforced concrete under each tower, etc.

Our high-speed lift (one floor per second) took us to the skybridge level, then we were let loose. It wasn't as spectacular as I expected. It's just a glass-and-steel bridgeway, which gives you a good view of the city. And close-ups of the sides of the buildings. You can't take very good pictures though because the glass reflects a bit. Apparently, that's the highest you can go up the Petronas Towers. Next thing we know, we're back on the ground floor.

Note: The Petronas Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world from April 15th, 1996 until October 17th, 2003 when Taipei 101 (Financial Center) was topped out at 508m (1676 ft).