Kuala Lumpur

Getting closer to home... Only 5 hours behind NZ time now. We took the airport express train into the city KL Sentral station...luxury for 4 nights at the new Aloft Hotel. It's off main season here so thunder and lightening and lashing rain, but only in the afternoons, otherwise fine and warm. The people are genuine and friendly and happy.  It's a cool city to get around by train, pedestrian sky bridges and on foot. 

Compulsory visit to the Petronas Twin Towers. Really beautiful. We spent the afternoon downpour inside the KLCC Mall... Imagine 10 Westfields stacked up in two piles of 5 with a full height glass between them. Pretty much the same stuff in them as well. There is a cool store called Uniqo (I think ) a bit like maybe Glassons but unisex, and every 30 seconds a staff member sings out 'welcome to Uniqo!'. It's in their contract. It's a strange mix of funny haha and funny peculiar.

 The twin corncobs....not us the towers

The mid city centre is very glitzy and almost Las Vegasian.

King Kong crossed with the Incredible Hulk? This guy stands outside the temple at the Batu Caves.

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That's one small step for man and one giant step for mankind.

The Murugan statue, a Hindu deity, 42m tall, made from steel and concrete, finished with gold paint. The caves are inside these limestone cliffs which were pushed up from under the sea 400 million years ago, to 100m above the surrounding ground level.

The Hindu Gods do a bit of line dancing on top of the entrance way

M about to enter the main Cathedral cave. He narrowly avoided serious injury; while climbing the 380 stairs a monkey hurled half a coconut at him and got him right on the heart. Quote...'he staggered and almost fell...'

One of the decorative Hindu shrines inside the main cavern

Graffiti from the 70's before the site was made secure. Possibly Einstein did some work on his Theory of Relativity here.

Hole in the roof to let the light in...handy.

Main cathedral caves. These were dynamited looking for fossils and the guano mined out for gardens. 

We also went on the tour into the Dark Caves, with a really cool guy who was so knowledgable as he was the head scientist and not just one of the regular guides. The cave system is quite different from Waitomo, being tropical. Swap glow worms for bats and guano. There's a whole arm closed off as a conservation project, famous for being the home of the recovering population of Trapdoor spiders. Very rare and valuable. M thinks he may have stood on one in the dark. To the uninitiated their nest looks like an unexciting lump of bark stuck in the wall. There are also cockroaches and crickets(wetas), centipedes and a very ancient beastie that looks like a tiny coiled up spinal column.