Wherever I May Roam: batu caves

The day after the "canopy walk," we went to see the Batu Caves, one of the most important sites of Hindu worship in the world. Every year, during the end of January/beginning of February, thousands of devotees make a pilgrimage to the caves for the Thaipusam festival, where they engage in various acts of devotion, notably, carrying/enduring various types of kavadi or burdens. As good ol' wikipedia explains, "at its simplest this may entail carrying a pot of milk, but mortification of the flesh by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with vel skewers is also common. The most spectacular practice is the vel kavadi, essentially a portable altar up to two meters tall, decorated with peacock feathers and attached to the devotee through 108 vels pierced into the skin on the chest and back. Fire walking and flagellation may also be practiced. It is claimed that devotees are able to enter a trance, feel no pain, do not bleed from their wounds and have no scars left behind."

Unfortunately, we were a month too early for the fest, but the caves site was pretty fucking spectacular nonetheless. Here's Maya outside the main gate - you can see the stairway of 272 steps leading up into the darkness of the main cave, the Temple Cave... as well, of course, as the 120-foot-plus gold-painted statue of the Hindu diety Lord Murugan.

As you walk up the 272 steps, there are wild monkeys everywhere, playing in the nearby trees; leaping, sitting, and sliding down the stairway railing; and some, even crawling around the steps themselves.

We saw this one enjoying a flower garland left as an offering inside the cave.

And we saw another monkey taking a completely unprovoked and unexpected swipe at an Indian dude walking down the steps not far from us. So yeah, they may be cute but are not to be trusted.

The temple cave, as you can see, is fucking huge, and - as you can't see - is full of colorful tableaus depicting a variety of bizarre dieties in a variety of equally bizarre interactions (blue multi-armed women standing on little baby-sized men with handlebar moustaches; cows with the heads, and boobs, of beautiful women, etc.).

Me, below some of temple cave's many drippy stalactites.

After the temple cave, Maya and I took a personal tour of another Batu cave, the accurately-but-not-so-creatively-named "Dark Cave." Here we are before the tour in our spiffy spelunker's helmets. The highlight of the tour was probably when, about 10 minutes into the cavern, the walkway came to life with all sorts of creepy-crawlies - it was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie - most of which turned out to be cockroaches that live off of all the guano (bat excrement) dropped on the cave floor.

Finally, here I am standing in front of a big statue of an insane-looking green monkey-faced dude at the bottom of the temple cave. Can't pretend to know much more than that (Maya says that she read that he is the most rarely worshipped diety from the Hindu pantheon - can't imagine why).