We flew back to KL from Kuching and jumped on a train to Ipoh. There wasn't too much waiting around fortunately as we've seen more than our fair share of KL Sentral station.
The train was awesome, fast, quiet, showed a film, the usual. We arrived in Ipoh and was immediately pounced upon by a swarm of taxi drivers, we tried to haggle with them, but they laughed so hard at our offer, we sheepishly walked off and found a cab away from the station entrance and still paid the same price.
The hotel was twenty minutes from the town centre, surrounded by a good variety of restaurants and bars a mall and most importantly a Tesco.
Ipoh is usually on the route to or from the Cameron highlands, it has some cave temples, a museum and a picturesque train station, the lack of stuff to do was partly the draw for us to come here after a few busy weeks.
We were just heading out, when the guy at reception asked if we wanted to see the local Chinese temple, we were hooked. He said he'd run us there as it was near where he was going, which in our experience personifies the Malaysian hospitality. We went to one of the cave temples, which was far bigger, more beautiful and interesting that we had imagined it would be, the climb up to the cave was through the treetops and afforded us some great views of the surrounding area and the distant mountains. Monkeys fed in the trees while birds chirped and the squeal of bats emanated from the caverns.
On the cave the walls were enormous paintings of gods and goddesses and in almost every nook was a small effigy of Buddha. As we walked further in, the paintings decreased as did the sunlight. Very quickly we were standing in absolute darkness, the noises around us were heightened by the loss of sight, the drips of water from the cave roof, the incessant screeching of bats, the warm wind whispering across the cave mouth somewhere behind us, it was both eerie and peaceful...(more eerie though).
After a look around the caves, we returned back to the absolute tranquility of the temple gardens, surrounded by amazing flowers, shady trees and a huge pond that was home to a large number of Koi carp and terrapins. We cooled down in the shade, it was lovely just to let our minds wander surrounded by this oasis, sometimes it's about how you feel rather than what you do that makes a place memorable.
We headed to downtown Ipoh, largely (and apparently, unusually) everything was closed, the shops, the museums and galleries, all closed. After a quick tour around the shuttered coffeehouses, the deserted restaurants and governmental buildings we returned to the hotel, it didn't feel like we missed too much.
That evening we treated ourselves to a bit of normality and went to the cinema, the film was ok, the paradox of doing something so ordinary feeling like such a treat wasn't lost on us.
We're headed back to KL for an overnighter before moving south to Singapore.