Batu Caves

To the tour coach this morning for a little trip outside the city.

The first stop is the Royal Selangor pewter factory, one of the most famous in the world.

It’s amazing what you can do when you pour molten tin alloy into a mould.

Especially when they fetch these prices. £1 was about 5.4 Malaysian ringgits today.

They also had some Marvel figurines. So it wasn’t just some random outlet stuck in the itinerary for the commission from Visitor Centre sales.

The largest tankard in the world.

After a stop at a batik studio (the national costume is based on hand-painted batik patterning) we move onto the real objective, the Batu Caves.

Not far out from KL, the landscape rises to 400 million year old limestone hills and sheer cliff outcrops. As is usual, where you get limestone you get caves. There are 13 of them around here.

The Orang Asil, the indigenous people of the area (the Malays migrated from what is now Indonesia) probably used these caves for millennia, but they were only made more widely known by an American naturalist in the 1870s.

The news particularly caught the attention of one Thambosooray Pillai. Remember the Pillai family from the Hindu temple with the long name? Pillai thought that the cave entrance resembled the javelin associated with Lord Murugan, and resolved to make the caves a Hindu holy site.

Which it is to this day.

Here’s the great statue of Lord Murugan protecting the entrance…

…with some help. We’ll be seeing a few more of them.

The special event at which Murugan’s chariot is moved from the Sri Mahamariamman temple in town, that I mentioned before, is called Thaipusam and the chariot gets wheeled out to the cave entrance. Specially devoted followers then make their way to the shrine caves in as painful a fashion as possible.

Oh, there are 272 steepish steps to those caves. They’re crowded with visitors but let’s have a try anyway. Just don’t look down…