Kuala Lumpur

Tuesday 25/11

We set to to wake up at 8 in the morning to we would not get to the Batu Cave when it was extremely hot. But with getting ready and stopping near the metro station for breakfast we ended up taking a lot of time. We had to get to the city with metro Ampang Line, switch at station Bandaraya to Line Port Klang stop Bank Negra and ride it all the way to Batu Caves. 

Metro chip.

The ride was an hour long. What we found interesting was that they had special coaches for ladies only.

Coach for ladies only.

Once we arrived the view was already intense. We first saw a huge statue of Lord Rama.

Peter Lamb and Lord Rama.

We kept walking, but already from there we saw the amazing statue of Lord Murugan and the high stairs we were going to climb. They consisted of 272 uneven concrete steps.

Lord Murugan next to the 272 steps.

While going up the steps we met the monkeys that our host had mentioned on the previous day. The monkeys were used to tourists, extremely rude and cheeky. They are known to steal from tourists anything that they can grab or snatch from hands. One of them actually grabbed a fruit out of Laura's plastic bag! 

Cheeky monkey with the stolen fruit.

The climb was not as bad as we expected it to be and we were up in no time. The view from the top of the big flight of the stairs is phenomenal.

View from the top.

We then continued into the caves, water was dripping form the walls, it was wet, fairly dark and humid. Once you get there, there is another smaller flight of stairs that take people right to the temple. It looked sad inside as in the corners there were old things, like unwanted furniture and garbage. But there were also beautiful pieces of art. 

The cave is deep but on the top there is a huge hole where light came in. We walked around while taking pictures and enjoying what we saw.

Inside the cave.

Then it was time to head back down. Again we got to see the nice view from the top, and meet some more monkeys along the way.

Monkey enjoying coconuts.

We then took a metro back to the centre. Santiago and Laura got off a stop before us. We got off at KL Sentral so we could go to the bus station and decide how to get to our next stop.

Peter Lamb pointing out to the rules of metro.

Due to lack of time we decided to head straight to Penang. We were thinking about taking the train, but again, there was no way they would allow to take the bikes on the train. And also, to our surprise, tickets to many of the destinations were sold out up until December, some even the end of December. Later we found out that is was most likely because it was school holiday in Malaysia at that time. So it was decided, we were going to take the bus. After a long time of thinking and looking through multiple options to multiple destinations we got tickets to go to and island to Georgetown in Penang. We got tickets for the following day noon and paid 149 ringgit for two tickets and we did not have to pay extra for the bikes.

Rainbow in KL.

With that finally settled we walked around a bit, but then it was time to meet up with our fellow couchsurfers. Alina and her friend Yan were nice and offered to give us a ride to go see the Petrona towers. For that we had to meet up with them at the metro station Kampung Baru. So we all gathered together and went for some food. As Pedro and I had recently eaten we just had some drinks. Yan joined us a bit later, sadly she had had a car accident. But thankfully she was fine and the most damage to her car was that the front number plate was falling of because a screw was lost.
Alina and Yan then drove us to the towers were we took some time to take pictures.

The Petronas Towers.

Couchserfers and the Petronas Towers.

After more and more pictures we got back to the cars. We then drove to a hilltop where there was a beautiful view over the city!

In some time we were back at our host's house. Guy from Indonesia ran off to get to the airport, he had an early flight the following morning, so he decided to stay the night there. Back at Alina's place rest of us stayed to chat, and once again it was very late when we got to sleep.

View of KL from a hilltop.