Day 243, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
The limestone Batu Caves house one of the most popular Hindu shrines outside of India. It is the location that hosts the Hindu community’s yearly Tamil festival. When you walk toward the caves, you see the world’s tallest statue of the Hindu deity, Murugan, stretching more than 140 ft into the sky.
We climbed the 272 stairs without much trouble. A few people left their shoes at the bottom and walked up the stairs and through the caves barefoot.
Along the stairs were macaques, eager to accept food or willing to go through your bag to help you find some. It felt a little as if we were invading their space. Occasionally the monkeys got aggressive and bit people. Seems like we need a monkey minder to protect their interests and keep people from getting too close.
100 meters up, there is the Cathedral Cave, Temple Cave, and Ramayana Cave.
The downpour started after we were dont with our visit, just the way we had planned. While the rain did it’s thing, we had some delicious Malay food, a noodle dish called Fried Mee Mamak.
Cali ordered the Malay fried rice. The things on the upper right hand side of the plate were a fish version of pork rinds. Very, very interesting.
On the other side of the spectrum, Cali wanted to get Madi something she’d like, since she had stayed home to study. I wanted to try Magicaroni, but Cali thought we should stick to something that’s a sure thing.
Paul had a great chat with the taxi driver, like he usually does. This time we learned how all the taxis in his company run on natural gas, and not “oil”. I didn’t know there were cars produced in mass that ran on natural gas.
Before bed Cali went up to swim in the rooftop infinity pool. Tomorrow we leave for Singapore.
