Malaysia | Batu Caves
I'm going to kick off my Malaysia posts with one of my favourite places I visited in Kuala Lumpur. Batu Caves is a series of caves and cave temples in a limestone hill (which is apparently around 400 million years old). The cave is one of the most popular Hindu shrines outside of India and one of Kuala Lumpur's most popular tourist spots. Here you can find the world's tallest statue of Murugan and loads of wild macaque monkeys. Having never seen wild monkeys before Orlaith and I were really excited about seeing them, but to the locals it was quite a normal sight. In fact they seemed more excited about seeing the pigeons!
There are 272 stairs to reach the caves which honestly weren't hard to climb at all. I arrived in shorts but was asked to cover my legs so I borrowed a scarf from a vendor to go up in. The macaques were all over the place and regularly stealing food from visitors. The first macaque I saw had a baby clinging to it's belly and had just stolen a bunch of bananas from a vendor, which it started eating in front of an excited crowd of onlookers before taking a few for the road and scampering off.
At one point, we were near a group of boisterous monkeys when two approached Orlaith. One of them yanked her hair while the other grabbed her t-shirt and started pulling her towards a ledge she was standing near (with a very big drop below). Two of us rushed over and shooed them away and luckily Orlaith was totally unfazed by the episode. I've since read that macaques are very territorial and can pose a biting hazard, but apart from that incident they just seemed very cheeky.
When we reached the top of the stairs we saw that it wasn't very well kept and there wasn't much to see up there apart from a few small Hindu shrines, but that was fine because we really enjoyed the experience. To climb the stairs at Batu Caves is free (I heard you can also rock climb up there!) but there is an option of going on a paid tour of the caves which we decided not to do.
Once we were safely back down the stairs and out of monkeys reach we bought some fresh coconut water from a vendor, which was my very first taste of it. While I love the taste of coconut flesh I was not a fan of the water at all, but I'm glad I tried it. The others loved their coconut water and were all glad they'd joined me on my 'touristy' adventure! Even if I was a bit obsessed with the monkeys...
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