My first look into the cave, it was not totally dark.  The light can come in from both sides, and there are several small holes on the roof of the cave.

In the cave, there are rusty metal railings in yellow which allow me to use them as tripods.

Looking backwards, I could not see the long “external” staircase anymore but just the decorated entrance, and some store selling souvenirs, toys etc.

This is one of their deity near the entrance that appear together with a peacock.  Look at His hand, does it mean “hello“, or it tells people to stop?  I noticed that quite a number of Hindu deities have this pose on their hands.  Sorry if I guess it wrongly.  If you know what does it mean, please tell me.  Thanks.

There were quite a a lot people there on that Sunday noon, most of them were Indian going there for praying.  The rest would be tourists.

These deities seem to be a family.  Am I right?  On the left and the middle, both of Them have 2 pairs of hand.  The female deity on the right has green skin.  I believe all of these outlooks (including what they are carrying and wearing) have their meaning and stories behind, and I am interested to know more about them.

More statues can be found on the stones on the wall, and they are in different sizes.  Some of them are lightened up with electrical lighting.  Some of them are offered by believers with small candle lights.

This lady sat at a corner in the cave.  We asked a believer who have just donated some money to her and touched her foot who this lady is, and he answered that she is not a normal person, she has achieved certain level in their religion and she was meditating.  He touched her leg because sometimes she will wake up from her meditation and give him something, but she did not have any response just now.  This lady always travels between different temples, and this is the second time he saw this lady.  The first time, he saw this lady at a temple in KL.

From our observation, we agree that she is meditating, because she did not even move an inch nor turn her eyeball.  She has also no facial expression at all.  According to that man, she has long hair.  Look at the object under her hand, that is her hair.  She did not put on any footwear, I wonder if she were to walk to another temple bare footed?

There is another higher flat ground in the cave accessible through another shorter “internal” staircase.  This area is the roofless area in the cave.

Right before walking up the staircase, there is a place to pray on the left.

Can you see the water drops shown as lines in the photo above?  The water from the lime stones drops to the ground non stop even it was not raining outside.  I wanted to take the photo of rain drops, at the same time I found that this huge stone next to the staircase is beautiful to be captured too.

SiewPeng and Colin in Batu Caves.

Next, we would climb up another staircase to a higher place in the cave in the coming posts.  Stay tuned.

This is the staircase at Batu Caves, KL.  There are 3 lanes.  I have never experienced how it feels like during Thaipusam, but I can imagine when all the three lanes are full of people.  It must be terrible.

As usual, everything has a starting point, each step is labeled with a number from 1 to 272.  I started with number 2, because it is my habit to take 2 levels per steps at a time while going up and down any staircase.  However, it does not mean I have skipped the first step.

SiewPeng and I climbed a few steps, and we stopped.  Not because we were tired, but we enjoyed the scenery and took a lot of photos along the way.

We climbed …

and climbed …

…

and climbed …  We did not actually count the steps, but I always had a feeling of how high I was by viewing the scenery.

Some where along the way, someone put a small bunch of bananas a few steps ahead of us.  Immediately, two monkeys came out and ate the bananas.  There was a foreigner with peanuts in her hand, one of the monkeys from random direction opened up her finger and took away the peanuts.  She was quite startled by it.

After I have taken enough photos of the monkeys, we continued to climb …

and climbed …

We almost reached the top.  :)

My mother told me her experience a few years ago, she has never thought that it was easier than she has expected to climb these steps and arrive at the top, and finally, I found out the reason.  She was thinking of something else when she climbed the staircase, and shifted her mind focus away from the tiredness.  This is an important tip that I have got.

Therefore, we relaxed our mind, took photographs and watched the monkeys eating and jumping around.

Without any difficulties and tiredness, we completed 272 steps and reached the entrance of the cave.  It should not be a problem for us at all, since we have hiked quite a few mountains and hills in Kuching and Ipoh which are more challenging than this staircase.  But when I found some Indian old folks also tried to climb up this staircase, and they moved their foot one step at a time and took a break between each step, I can feel their difficulty.

When I stood on the 272th step and looked down, I could see the scenery from further away, but the Murugan deity statue is hidden from certain angle.  Look at the flyover on the picture above, the bus driver had let us off the bus quite far beyond the flyover, and we walked underneath the flyover to get across the highway, and now we stood on Batu Caves.  We can feel the distance.

There were candles along the staircase left by the prayers.

The entrance of the Dark Cave is on the left lane of the staircase.  It kept on playing advertisement using their speaker, which was very annoying.  They collect fee from visitors to enter the Dark Cave.  We did not explore into the Dark Cave, but it would be in our list of place-to-go next time we travel to KL.

We started going down.  Same as what we did when we climbed up, I took the photo of the scenery one more time, and now I have to select the best photos from a lot of similar photos that I have taken.

For those people who don’t like to do exercise or have their body moved, you may suggest to have a cable car to carry you to go up the hill.  But if it really happens, you will miss out the experience of walking up the staircase, it would not be fun anymore.  For the religion prayers, walking up the staircase will make them feel holy, and increase their confidence physiologically, because they have experienced the achievement and they can tell themselves, “I DID IT”.