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”.