8AM: a clear, beautiful Saturday morning at the Lembah Kiara Recreational Park in Taman Tun Dr Ismail KL. It was my first time here and the park looked impressive. There were many joggers and families doing their morning exercises, or people strolling under the shady trees and admiring the big pond near the entrance.

Some construction stuff going on, but otherwise the park was nice and green. Groups of older people were doing taichi while some meditation music blasted in the background. Some families were also picnicking with mats on the grass.

I was here to cover a CSR programme to educate primary and secondary school kids on river and water conservation. They do it once every two months and this time around it was with a group of Fifth Formers.

I think schoolkids these days are lucky because they get to join all these ‘holistic’ programmes. Back in my day (that makes me sound really old but yeah) ‘learning’ was mostly through text books because of our theory and exam-based Asian-style education.

Part of Sungai Penchala flows through the park. The teens and their facilitators waded into the river and collected samples for testing. They also learnt about the river flora and fauna by catching river shrimps, dragonflies and other microorganisms.

Good thing it was shady.

The river was quite clean. You could see the base and there were tiny fish and spiders swimming about.

The children were from an ‘eco-school’ – meaning that they adopted many green practices in their school projects. Their teacher said that they had recycled cooking oil projects which they sold to companies to be made into biodiesel. They also create compost from coffee beans collected from cafes, and make their own products such as candles to sell or as gifts at school functions.

The samples were tested for things like dissolved oxygen content, phosphate and nitrate content, pH levels, etc to determine how ‘healthy’ the river was.

A river shrimp.

The whole programme was pretty educational, and I suppose its more fun to wade about in rivers than just read about it in Science class. Even I learnt some stuff – like what sort of insects and organisms you’ll find in a very clean river (like stone flies) or a dirty river (maggots and the like).

Someone meditating at the closed off waterfall feature.

The park was huge. It took me a good 15 mins to walk from the entrance to the area where they were conducting the programme. And this was just a small part of the park.

Lembah Kiara park is a good place to exercise at if you live in the neighbourhood. But if (ever) I can drag myself out of the bed on weekends, I don’t think a 40min drive there is worth it, especially with the crazy traffic.

Lembah Kiara Park @ Jalan Haji Openg

Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Kuala Lumpur

***I don’t think there are many buses servicing the route coz it’s like smack in the middle of housing and not within the city center. Best to take a Uber ?

*U82 from Bandar Utama is the closest but you’ll still have to walk about 650ms down the road.