Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Last Two Days in KL - Friday/Sat April 29-30

The loss of appetite kicked in on Friday as I got the cough under control with meds -- but I chose to just hang out in my nice condo and catch up on my planning and reading (and sleeping! as I was also suffering serious jet lag -- I gotta stop pretending this old body can do what it used to do!).  Anyway, by Saturday I was ready for another adventure -- this time to visit what Lonely Planet describes as one of Malaysia's National Treasures and holiest Hindu sites: the Batu Caves.  Again I navigated the public transportation system from the monorail to the "Komuter" trains and arrived at the site that are both functioning temples and tourist-attracting caves.  It was the first time I noticed the trains had separate cars for women only:

I took in all the caves, including the Ramayana Cave that Lonely Planet describes as "more spectacularly over-embellished...which boasts gaudy diaramas of the Indian epic Ramayana"

and climbed the 272 steps to the Temple Cave:

and took a 45 minute guided tour into "Dark Cave:"

All interesting and informative both on culture and cave creatures.

All in time to get back to KL Sentral in time for a meet up with a friend and fellow teacher of my daughter/son-in-law when they taught English in China in 2009 (their blog is here).  Kris has been in SE Asia since 2008 and is currently awaiting her work visa here in Malaysia to begin a two year university-level teaching assignment.  Kris has been a long time blogger:  https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/sunketing/
and I had a great time learning from her.  I'll look forward to crossing paths with her again - a wonderful resource and another friend added to my life.