Cave Temples at Ipoh

Disclaimer: this post is really, really long. You've been warned.

Last Friday, on our way to Kuala Lumpur, we stopped in Ipoh to take a look at several of the cave temples in the Kinta Valley. This part of Malaysia has huge limestone mountains with tones of karst formations, which basically means that the edges of the mountains are cliff-like and there are lots and lots of caves within the mountains (super cool, i know). Anyway, when the Chinese and Indian settled the Ipoh area in late 19th century, they turned several of these caves into temples. We stopped at three of the most famous. Unfortunately I can only remember the names of two of them, both of which were Buddhist caves. The third one was a Taoist cave temple and was the least well known of the three (which is probably why I didn't remember the name...)

The first cave temple we visited was called Sam Poh Tong (Tong means cave but I have no idea what the first part means...probably because I don't know any Chinese). Though it wasn't by any the means the largest, this cave temple was probably my favorite of the three. As you walk towards the cave there are gardens and ponds and bunch of other cool stuff. For lack of being able to describe how cool it looks I give you more pictures.

The Main Gate (rear side)

So after this awesomeness, you walk into this big cavern that's filled with shrines and statues. Really cool. Since a written description doesn't really work in this case, here are more pictures! wooo





However, the best part of this cave was actually outside of the cave. If you continue through the cave it lets out into this secluded area that's surrounded by mountains on all sides. In this area there was this really cool building and a TURTLE POND. yes, you can feed the turtles. It's awesome. Here are some more pictures as this is something better experienced visually.

Turtles I fed at the Turtle pond! om nom nom

So after this we went to a Daoist (also spelled Taoist) Cave, which was totally different. How different? Well for one thing they have awesome kiddie rides at the entrance.

Because no religious site is complete without a gimicky rooster ride...

Aside from that the inside of the cave was very different than the previous cave. Shrines were not as elaborate and some of them were paintings on the actual cave wall, not statues or altars and the like. Also, in one part there were MONKEYS which was just fabulous. Here are a couple pictures showing the inside of the cave.

One of the aforementioned monkeys

The last cave we went to was Kek Lok Tong which was absolutely HUGE. HUGE HUGE HUGE. This cave, though mainly a Buddhist site, also had several statues of Daoist deities. All of the statues were a lot bigger than the other ones...mainly because the interior of this cave is just really big. There were also some quirky things about this site...like this small Eiffel tower statue with a Mickey Mouse figurine below it.


Anyway, here are some pictures of the rest of Kek Lok Tong

This is not even half of the entrance. There was a reason I put huge in all caps

I also want to add that at this one rest stop on the road to Ipoh we stopped at a gas station that had "refreshrooms" instead of restrooms. Apparently the difference between refreshroom and restrooms is that in refreshrooms you assume the pose shown below...
Anyway, that's all for now. I'll put up another post in a couple of days.