Batu Caves: Imagine This Place With Over a Third of a Million People in it a Day!

The giant gold statue guarding the entrance to the caves

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Just outside Kuala Lumpur is a Hindu temple site that is literally located inside a giant cave:  Batu Cave.  So, we paid our 25 cents worth for the bus ride out there and checked it out. 

This is the site of an annual Hindu festival called Thaipusam.  It's a 3 day festival and numbers of participants literally reach over 1 million over the 3 days.  We don't really know much about Thaipusam, so I won't bother getting into it.  What we did hear about were some of the conditions during the festival.  Apparently it's not the best time to be inside if you're severly claustrophobic.  With that many people all piled into a relatively small space, you'd be shoulder to shoulder and taking baby steps to get around.  We didn't want to think about how bad the BO (body odour) smell would be considering the heat, humidity and close spaces.  Also, they apparently don't bring in portapotties (portable toilets), so it's not usual to have people just squat and go inside the cave.  Doesn't sound the most appealing huh?  That's religious dedication!

The entrance to the grounds of Batu Caves

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To get into the main cave you have to climb 272 stairs, just enough to make you want to stop halfway up to catch your breath.  You can't miss them.  They're beside the huge gold statue.  Once inside there are a number of shrines available for the Hindu faithful to take their offerings and say some prayers.  There's also a couple of souvenir stands.  Figures.  

Lots of monkeys inside.  We've started to get used to seeing monkeys by now, so they weren't really a novelty, except for the one who was trying to saw his way inside a soft drink can.

After looking around for about half an hour we thought, "Alright, let's go back home" (home being our  guesthouse).  Not being Hindu, it didn't really hold a special place in our hearts.  It was fun to check out though, and we're glad we did.

272 stairs into the caves. They're even numbered on the steps themselves.

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Michael and Heather