I couldn’t sleep today. I was probably looking forward to riding and exploring new places so much again that it wouldn’t let me sleep. So I read through the brochures for Malaysia I had and prepared my Malaysian path between about 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning.

I got up at 6AM, had a shower (actually there is no shower in the hotel – you have to pour water over your body from a little bucket – that is the traditional way in Malaysia), ate my breakfast, packed up and got on my way half past seven. My first destination was Batu Caves – a well-known Hindu shrine located inside a huge limestone outcrop at a location supposedly just outside KL (Kuala Lumpur). It is in fact still “in the middle” of the city as the city has long consumed it due to its fast expansion. After I left  the caves I still had to ride about 15 to 20 km before I really left the city behind.

The main cave of the shrine has a ceiling over 100m high. I can recommend this tourist attraction as it is interesting and the monkeys running around are really entertaining. I saw my first Malaysian monkey around about 50th step of the 272 step staircase leading up to the caves. I thought it was great and lucky to see it so I started taking photos of it and taping it. Next thing I know there is a second one, and a third one, and…. Well, there were lots of them – hopping along the walls of the staircase, climbing the trees and rocks around, playing with each other… The ones that were on the staircase were getting lots of food – nuts, chips etc. from the tourists. Up at the actual shrine there was maybe even more of them, requesting and sometimes even stealing food from passing tourists and from each other. Some of them were quite cheaky but it was fun. Oh, and the mango cocktail down in the Indian shops is just heaven.

I have to say that KL is not easy to navigate. When I thought they stole my GPS in Australia I was actually considering not getting another one since I wasn’t sure if it was really necessary or if the GPS was just another toy of mine – a gadget that I didn’t really need. Well, now I was soooooo happy that I had my GPS that I can’t even explain how happy. I think that without it I would still be running around in circles in KL. The navigational signs in KL are not very informative and they appear and disappear at random. You can be following a route leading somewhere and suddenly the signs stop telling you about the chosen destination and that’s it. Thanks to my GPS, which I’m really starting to love now, I was able to keep the general correct direction and no detour (and there were a few) could get me out of my course.

After riding about 70 km through the still very busy outskirts of KL I finally was on some highway that seemed to be outside of the boundaries of the city. I stopped and checked my GPS for Batu Caves and found out that I actually didn’t include it in today's route. Thanks to that I had to kind of return a bit. Again, thanks to my GPS finding Batu Caves wasn’t too hard at all.