This was such a wild and incredible place, I thought it should have its own post. Plus I took a metric fuck ton (technical term) of pictures at this place from seeing monkeys stealing various things to incredible caves nestled into mountains to the incredibly colorful steps. This place was a total 10/10, would recommend.
A quick bit of history about the caves:
They are over 400 million years old
The caves are a Hindu temple and shrine which attracts thousands of religious visitors and tourists every year
I heard when the Hindu festivals are held in the caves, the main cave is completely filled which is insane
The main cave is about three hundred feet tall and about eighty feet wide and one hundred feet deep (translation - it’s fucking huge)
There are 272 steps to get up into the caves (they were actually repainted a few years ago to have that wild color scheme)
Apparently was discovered by some Chinese farmers who were looking for guano (bat poop) for fertilizer in their fields
The images above were from when I walked from the railway station to the entrance of the Batu Caves. I was astounded by two things: that there were about fifty monkeys just roaming, jumping and stealing freely all around me (I got the shit scared out of me by my nurse before I left for this trip about rabies) and that there was this jolly old Chinese man feeding the entire flock. It was wild to see and almost felt like an impromptu circus.
The entrance to the Batu Caves, once you get off of the high speed railway line and make your way past the first wave of monkeys and onto the second.
What struck me initially walking up these stairs, besides the colors, were the amount of monkeys on the mountain. It was incredible, I have never seen anything like it in my life. Literally hundreds of monkeys, not exaggerating in the slightest, were bouncing, climbing, jumping, swinging and scaling the entire mountain. From a distance it looked like the mountain was moving, slowly morphing, and maybe even pulsing. Since I knew no one dosed my water with LSD, I kept on looking into the mountain and saw it was not moving at all but crawling, littered if you will, with hundreds upon hundreds of monkeys. It looked like a scene from planet of the apes.
While I was walking up the steps to the top, this one little monkey (pictured above) gave everyone on the stairs quite a show. This little bastard jumped onto someones back, took a bottle of orange juice out of their backpack, ran away from them up the stairs and onto a fifteen foot tall street lamp and proceeded to try and open this bottle. It took this little guy a solid five minutes to try and figure out how to open this bottle (stupid monkey), and he was getting visibly angry which was even more funny. While this silly little monkey is trying to open the bottle, he has a crowd of about twenty tourists all looking at him, rooting for him, and a bit envious of him. Once this guy finally opened the bottle with his feet, he opened it sideways and all the precious juice started to leak out. In a mad frenzy he torqued his body, made his feet go to his ears and drank every last drop. One of the funniest things I’ve seen the entire trip., my cheeks were sore from laughing so much.
View from the top of the stairs - part I
View from the top of the stairs - Part II
View from the top of the stairs - Part III - looking down upon the city
The photos above are the view from the inside of the main cave, the cathedral cave, which behind it open up into another cave, a cave within a cave. Very meta. It was absolutely huge. Inside this cathedral cave you could fit the height of a thirty story building and pretty sure you would be able to fit a plane or two on the ground floor. It’s absolutely wild. It’s a cathedral of granite.
