I haven't been doing much in Kuala Lumpur. I've been here eight nights now I think, and I've barely left the hostel except for food. I've just been catching up on internet stuff – like the Mammalwatching blog!! – writing zoo reviews, uploading photos, all that sort of stuff. I did go and see the new Hobbit movie too of course. Also it is too hot to do much and it has been raining for the second part of almost every day. I don't usually like Kuala Lumpur, it is my least favourite city in Asia (or my most hated, to put it in a more accurate way), but it is actually nice being here after China. Here I can walk into any shop at all and ask a question in English and the person can answer me. I can read all the signs. There's nobody spitting on the floor in the train stations. There are no bait-balls of people getting on and off transportation. There is no visible fog of lung-eroding pollution hanging in the air. Life is pretty easy at the moment.
I have seen some common city birds here and there. There is a male koel –a crow-sized cuckoo – in the trees outside the hostel which has been calling persistently all day every day (and half of every night it seems like) but has also been persistently stubborn in allowing me to see him! It is weird with birds how they will completely ignore everything in the vicinity, no matter how disruptive, but as soon as a lone birder appears the bird immediately hides or flees! I have seen the koel twice – flying away as I tried to find which tree the call was coming from – so it is on the trip list but I still haven't managed to get a perched view of him.
I have made a trip to Zoo Negara and seen a few wild birds in the grounds whilst there (tailorbirds, glossy starlings, bulbuls, etc) and a visit to the Batu Caves where I saw crab-eating macaques for the mammal list.
I'm not sure I'd heard of the Batu Caves before yesterday but they are on the outskirts of the city and easy to get to (they have their own LRT station with trains running every half an hour!). One of the guys in my dorm room had been there the previous day and, knowing of my interests, told me that you can get a guided tour of the caves to show you the bats. I had a google and found that there are several bat species in the caves, the most likely of which to see would be the long-tongued fruit bat
Eonycteris spelaea. I had never thought I'd be able to pick up any new mammal species in Kuala Lumpur, so I was definitely going! I dropped off my passport at Ever Fine Tours for them to put a Burmese visa into, and then took the train to the caves. The caves are halfway up the face of a big gobstopper of rock, and so being Asia they have built a great long staircase up to the entrances and then scattered Godzilla-sized gold statues all around the place. The stairs are covered in crab-eating macaques prowling around ready to attack anybody silly enough to be openly carrying food. You can buy monkey food there too, which doesn't help the situation. I kept a look-out for any tour counters but saw none, so climbed all the way to the top of the stairs where there were two huge caverns, both open to the sky either in part or fully, and hence useless for bats. They were filled instead with feral pigeons. I went back down the stairs, seeing the entrance to the Dark Cave on the way but it was gated up. I thought it must only be opened for letting tours in and out. Down the bottom I asked around and got no straight answers. I was starting to get really frustrated and annoyed because of the heat and everything. Eventually I found a security guard who told me the tour counter was the green hut at the top of the stairs on the left. I went all the way back up the stairs, pretty much ready to punch any monkey in the face who dared to look at me sideways, and found the hut empty with no signs (which is why I hadn't noticed it before). I asked the guy in the little shop next to it. Turns out the Dark Cave is open six days a week. The one day of the week it is closed is the day I was there.
The next day I returned to the caves and went straight up to the green hut. It was still empty. I found out that the tour counter is actually inside the cave entrance itself. The tour cost 35 Ringgits and was really good. The cave isn't a huge complex or anything, it's quite a simple cave, but the girl doing the tour was super-enthusiastic and bubbly and obviously enjoyed doing it, unlike some tour guides where they have done the walk and spiel so often they end up ruining the tour for all the participants. The cave was filled with the squeaking of
Eonycteris (being a fruit bat the sonar signals are easily audible to human ears) and I saw some flying around in the better lit areas (it is forbidden to shine the torches upwards). It was sad seeing the graffiti on the cave walls along the way – people really are jerks at heart – and that is the reason the cave is now open by tour only. The girl leading the tour had a little flip-book of pictures and diagrams to illustrate what she was talking about, and I was very excited to see that there were
Liphistius trapdoor spiders here (more excited than about seeing a new species of bat!!). This type of spider is a sort of living fossil; unlike other modern spiders it has a segmented abdomen. The species here is
Liphistius batuensis, thought to be endemic to this one cave system, and they are endangered because of collection of specimens for the pet trade, a demand driven by their uniqueness. I have wanted to see a
Liphistius for a long time but I had no idea where or how to look. Unfortunately the part of the cave they live in was not part of this tour. There was an extended tour which did include that part of the cave and on which it was possible to see them (or at least their web-nests on the walls) but the next one wasn't for another week. Outside the cave at the end of the tour the girl showed me where there was a young Wagler's pit viper, in the trees right outside the entrance.
Tomorrow I plan on making a day-trip to Kuala Selangor for more birds, then the next day I go to Bukit Fraser (finally!) where I will spend the rest of my time until I have to come back to KL for the flight to Burma on the 26 December (so only about five days there in the end).
Zoo Negara review here:
http://www.zoochat.com/249/zoo-negara-visit-15-dec-2013-a-348984/
I'm not bad with my guessing after all.
