Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur - a city of many religions

Where To Go Next By I&P
Jan 8, 2023
2 min read

After enjoying Christmas at the Petronas Towers, we went to visit the cultural sites of this vibrant city that welcomes people from all over Asia and the world.

After a quick metro from KL Sentral, we went to the biggest Mosque in Malaysia, the National Mosque of Malaysia that can welcome up to 15000 worshippers. I mean it's big but nothing compared to the biggest Mosque in Indonesia. Tourists can visit the Mosque but we arrived during prayer time so we could only visit the outside. 🤦‍♂️

After, we took the bus to go to the Thean Hou Temple, an impressive 4 storey-Buddhist temple on top of a hill with a view of the KL skyscrapers. The temple is a little bit far from the closest bus stop (15min on foot) but it is worth it, not only for the beautiful and colorful temple itself with many red Chinese lanterns, but also for the view of the city's main towers, and to take a picture with your own Chinese zodiac sign! 🐕

The following day, after visiting the Islamic and Buddhist religious sites, we went to see an Hindu temple called Batu caves. You need to take the direct KTM Komuter train from KL Sentral to go there (45min).

When we arrived, we stumbled into a huge limestone mountain below which you could find a giant statue of a green Hanuman, the monkey god. 🐒

Walking a little bit further, you find a very colorful Hindu temple, the colored steps to go up to the cave and a massive golden statue of Murugan, one of the major deities of Hinduism, also called Kartikeya, god of war and victory.

The 250 steps climb is risky as you meet a lot of daring and hungry monkeys. See how a monkey ate a terrified little girl's ice cream. Fun fact, they don't like chocolate! 🙊

Once at the top, you find yourself in a huge cave within which you are surprised to find a full temple and an additional flight of stairs. Those stairs allow you to reach the bottom of a pit dug by time and rain, with a large opening to the sky.

It is a very lovely temple but a little bit filthy as trash is not collected and dropped anywhere by monkeys and probably tourists as well. I guess we need to teach the monkeys to sweep in exchange for ice creams. 😜

At least there were no visible cockroaches, which was the case on a few occasions in Kuala Lumpur, especially in the first apartment we rented. There were small roaches in the kitchen area and bathroom 😖 - we had to move to another hotel.

To finish our time in KL, we walked around 2 other monuments just next to each other:

The first one was the Masjid Jamek Sultan Abdul Samad that splits the city's river in two. You also have a very good viewpoint of some beautiful murals on historic buildings.