Batu Caves

I will be posting about Batu Caves only not now because I don't have any photographs.  There's a story there but it's so embarrassing I may not tell you what happened. However, Christie and Bianca will be sending the photos they took of us exploring these sacred caves only they're jaunting around A.E. Asia for the next two weeks thus we'll have to wait until they get home and have access to their photo program before we can see it for ourselves.

In the meantime, I'll just tell you there was this really creepy moment in those caves when an army of macaques came down the ... gosh, what do they call that geological feature when part of a limestone cave collapses and you can see the sky? ... heading straight for us and it was exactly like that really eerie scene at the end of the film "Congo" when the grey killer apes come down the same-geologicial-thing and attack the scientists.

Let's see if I can find the film:



Just found the movie trailer, but you can make out a little of it towards the end.

However, unlike those grey killer apes, this army of Batu Cave macaques just went around grabbing everyone's plastic bags and running away to look through them, eating whatever they found in there.

Hey, I just found a short film on youtube that shows the place, so I can talk about it here afterall:



See those steps? 275 of them and so steep? In order to be a credit to heavy smokers everywhere, I was determined to get up them climbing fast and without stopping.  In the end, I did stop six times, but five of those times were because my knees hurt and the sixth time it was that my heart was pounding.

Keith, Christie and Bianca (two young Australian girls in their 20s), none of them smokers, stopped as many times as I did, and with them it was because they couldn't catch their breath whereas my lungs were well up to the task.  Yayyy!

Inside? Batu Caves, unlike Pak Ou Caves in Luang Prabang, don't feel sacred.  They feel commercial and despite a large number of cleaning crew, working constantly, they are littered and dirty, although I think we should blame the macaques for that.

And the oddest thing I found about these sacred caves is that they're Hindu.  Since the British brought the Indians out to Malaysia only 150 years ago, and these caves are 400 million years old, why weren't they claimed by some religion much, much earlier.  Odd isn't it!

The geology of the place, however, was stunning and halfway up those steps there's an entrance to another set of caves that are blocked off and which you can't enter without a guide because they're dark and dangerous, and touring them apparently involves rafts and life-jackets and wet-weather gear and I really wished we had longer in Kuala Lumpur so we could do that instead.

Which means we have to go back to Kuala Lumpur soon.  Yes?