Monkey Business

Taking advantage of clear skies and an urge to get out of the city we packed our sunscreen and bug spray and decided to check out FRIM (Forestry Reasearch Institute of Malaysia).  Located just 20 minutes away but what feels like a million miles, FRIM is essentially a 15 square kilometer piece of semi-maintained jungle.  It's main attraction is a jungle canopy walk

Now I'll be honest, I wasn't exactly heartbroken to find that this was closed for maintenance.  You can't tell from the photo how high up this is, but getting to the place where this photo was taken was a 1/2 km hike that was more or less vertical.  It's also narrow, wobbly, and largely constructed of rope.  The sign at the landing includes a multitude of warnings including: don't jump, don't run, don't sway and by the way we aren't responsible for any injuries.  Yikes.  There is a little note that says this bridge 'was constructed with the help of the Germans.'  This momentarily made me feel better, but I decided that sentence lacks a crucial component, 'was constructed and is maintained with the help of the Germans' would have made a world of difference.  After further reflection, I also decided that it's entirely possible that statement isn't even true, it's just to make chickens like me feel better.  In any event, this canopy walk looked like something out of Indiana Jones and in no way compared to a similar and much safer treetop walk we did in Western Australia with the Giant Tingle Trees.

Spared the treachery of the canopy walk, we had a perfectly pleasant walk through the jungle and saw monkeys and lizards.  I have also never been so hot in my whole entire life.  My hair was dripping, my tank-top soaked, it was quite frankly disgusting.

Thus we completed our walk and in dire need of air conditioning hopped in the car.  As we were in the area we thought we'd stop by and check out the Batu Caves.

The caves are the most holy Hindu site in Malaysia and are essentially several temples and shrines set in these massive caves.  Now I imagine it is quite a sight to behold if you come when one of the big Hindu festivals is on, but the caves are really fairly uninspiring.  There is a lot of junk kicking about - cables running everywhere and aluminum fencing which really takes away from it.  There are also a lot of thieving, mangy macaques hanging about and pigeons enough to make even a hardened Parisian shudder.  I'd call it a tourist trap but as it only costs about 25 cents to park and is donations only for entry, one can't complain.  As a geological feature the caves are interesting enough and there are some decent food stalls - we enjoyed a delicious dosa each for lunch which came to a mere 75 cents apiece.  Ian also loaded himself up with a myriad of Indian sweets.  All in all a pretty good day; between our hike and then marching up the nearly 300 steps to the caves, there was little left to do but pack it in and head home for a dip in the pool.