Batu Caves - Kuala Lumpur

Today the weather was perfect for a full day out and on my list of recommendations were the Batu Caves and no one should journey to Kuala Lumpur without a visit to them. So with morning, lunch and afternoon meals prepared I headed off for the metro station.

Macaque monkeys hunting for scraps from visitors

The Batu Caves are part of the important Tamil Hindu complex of temples including over 272 stairs leading to a main cave temple complex and you pass a very large statue of a Hindu god at the bottom. The limestone caves are filled with a number of Hindu legend scenes and form a very important place of pilgrimage for devotees during important festivals outside India. This may also be your first interaction with the local wildlife, in this case the Macaque monkey. Their reasonably well-behaved but I would suggest not feeding them as they will become a bit too friendly as I observed with one Chinese group of tourists attempting to take selfies with one monkey that tried to take the phones off them.

Recent painting of the steps from concrete neutral to rainbow colours has caused a bit of an annoyance for the heritage authority of the Malaysian Government. The temple at the top of the stairs was designated as an important heritage site in 2012 and any future renovation work etc would require approval. Every 12 years the Indian community conducts a clean up of the site and you guessed it they also decided this would be an ideal time to paint the steps in rainbow colours as a way of attracting younger generations to the site and including more tourists. It certainly has the intentioned visually dramatic effect but time will determine if this colour scheme remains. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to reverse it but it would be a great community project for the graffiti terrorists as part of their rehabilitation therapy.