Ipoh Hotels
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You can feed the monkeys
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The next day, we caught the bus to Ipoh and made our way to our hotel for the next two days - the New Caspian Hotel - which was quite close to the centre of Ipoh.
Ipoh itself is very industrialised, with most of the small number of sites that are worth visiting being located further out from the centre and requiring a taxi ride. We decided that the following morning we would head to see the Perak Tong Temple (a Chinese cave temple) and Kellie's Castle, choosing to eat that evening at the D'Night cafe just down the road (very good, very cheap, and with Mr Bean on the TV - what more could you ask for?).
The following morning we mentioned to the chap behind reception what we were looking to do and asked how best to get to these places. He very helpfully offered to call a taxi for us, and told us how much we would be looking to pay for the two trips we were planning (8 Ringitts per way to the cave temple, and 50 Ringitts for the half hour out to Kellie's Castle, with the driver waiting for an hour before bringing us back). We asked him to book the taxi for the Perak Tong Temple which turned up a few minutes later.
Shortly thereafter, we arrived at Perak Tong Temple, which was built in 1926 by a Buddhist priest from China and houses over 40 Buddha. The view of the outside of the temple, while impressive, gives you no indication of the size and scale of the temple itself once you get inside. You enter through a relatively small doorway to immediately see a huge seated Buddha gleaming in the sunlight, with many more images of Buddha (both statues and paintings on the cave wall) throughout the remainder of the vast cave system. We spent a short while looking around here before heading up the steep climb of almost 400 steps to the top of the hill that houses the temple, finishing up with a wonderful view of Ipoh itself (and all the industrialisation...). Once we had recovered from the exertions of the climb, we headed back down the steps to the main cave system and, along the way, spotted a whole family of monkeys (around ten or so) who were climbing around the trees, hillside and outside parts of the temple looking for any food that may have been dropped by tourists. We quickly took out our cameras and snapped away at the friendly animals (I think they wanted food, but we didn't have any) as they climbed and jumped around before arriving back in the temple and continuing our picture taking (after checking we were allowed to), trying to capture the best possible images in the semi-light of the main cave.
After our tour of the temple, we decided to head back for the hotel rather than go to the other main temple in the area, Sam Poh Temple, which is supposed to have suffered recently with graffiti, deciding that it would be nigh on impossible to better the sights afforded by the Perak Tong Temple.
After grabbing some (very spicy) food at the nearby Chinatown cafe, we asked at reception in the hotel if he could book a taxi to Kellie's Castle for us, which dutifully turned up soon after.
The driver drove us the half hour or so out of town to Kellie's Castle (recommended as one of the top ten things to see in this region of Malaysia) and we clambered out of the taxi in the baking heat to have a look around. Kellie's Castle is an unfinished mansion built by a Scottish planter called William Kellie Smith and forms a rather bizarre sight as you come along the road to it, completely out of character with the other buildings in the region. Through a combination of illness amongst the workers and the death of Kellie himself from pneumonia in Portugal in 1926, the castle was never finished.
As we crossed the bridge across to the castle, we saw a number of locals standing in the river with nets, dashing back and forth across the river as a friend shouted to them from slightly further up the bank pointing out which part of the river they may find their evening meal in. We spent a short while walking around the building, which is an empty shell and completely empty of furniture, before getting back in the taxi. I mentioned that we were looking for the entrance to the secret tunnel to the nearby Hindu temple which Kellie built for his workers and our taxi driver kindly took us down the road to see this and explained that the main image in the temple is one of Kellie himself (quite odd that he should think his workers should pray to him!) and that one of the images on the outside of the temple is also of Kellie (we spotted the latter, a white man with a mustache, rifle and hunting garb, but not the former as the door to where the statue was housed was closed). After snapping some pictures of this oddity, we made our way back to the hotel, ready to depart for Pulau Penang the following day. Personally, I disagree with the guide book and would highly recommend the temple over Kellie's Castle if you only have time for one stop.
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