Advertisement
Published: September 8th 2007
Edit Blog Post
We got a cheap flight out of the most random Airport ive ever been to...... in Samui......all open and trying to be authentic thai with the style of the buildings, which meant we avoided 12/14 hours on a minibus!! The plane was also the smallest weve ever been on...... just 13 rows of seats.
We landed in a Penang, Northern Malaysia after a hour of flying in what was quite a modern airport.....something we hadnt seen for a while in thailand. We then jumped in a taxi to take us to the capital, Georgetown, and we were quite amazed at how different the country is to Thailand. As we drove down a motorway complete with crash barriers and overhead lights, we both thought you could be driving down the M6 past B'ham it was that similar. Then we arrived at our pad for the night which was also random....... it was a hotel that had been last renovated in the 1980's by the look of it....and at $10 (still no pound sign) we werent expecting a butler service! Its alright though and quite comfortable - Bex can even plug her hair straightners into the 3 pin wall socket so shes
quite happy. We immediately went out for a wander and to find some food and found it quite hard to find a restaurant. We got called from across the street by the owner of a cafe where we sampled authenic Tandoori chicken and Naan bread....... which we ate with our hands!! Everything seems to close well early - in thailand we were used to things opening and getting busy later on in the evenings, whereas 9/10pm is shut up shop for most of the street stores. In a way were quite happy with this and have started a few days of detoxing after quite a long stint of drinking buckets!! Our first nights sleep wasnt that comfortable though.....our room came with air conditioning but no way of switching it off? Or so it seemed. The room was so cold for the whole night that we decided to check out unless we could turn it off. After playing with the complex system for a while we noticed there were 2 bits of wood you could slide across the airflow hence turning it off!! Brilliant! After opening the windows for a while to let in some heat the room was quite toasty!
The next day we headed out to see some sights.....our first being the English fort built in the 1800's. For all you historical buffs...... the english took over Penang in the 1800's as a trading post to the far east... hence why there is quite alot of english-ness about this place (malaysia as a whole used to be controlled by the brits until 1957). Anyway we got a few snaps of us with cannons and a rifle.....its no AK though! We then walked around for a bit before stumbling across the Chocolate Boutique which was quite near to our hotel. We were shown around buy a little indian woman who explained all of the different chocolates and kept giving us samples whilst walking round....... with myself only wanting an afternoon treat after so much walking all day. She kept telling us we'd get great discounts for bulk buying and stuff and we both kept looking at each other as if to say we only wanted 1 bar...... in the end we bought a fairly big stack of the stuff and ran away quickly!! We then headed out for one of the local places to eat at Nagore place....a mixture
of chinese/indian/thai/italian cafe's. We walked into a chinese place and it was full of locals who all went very quite for a moment whilst staring at us...... and then sparking up their conversations again. The waitress person came over with the menu and told us she'd help us out by choosing our meals for us.....Myself and Bex nodding every so often when we heard something familiar, and me shaking my head everytime the word 'fish' or 'peanut' came up. Weve since found out that the place we ate was a mixture of chinese and malay cuisine known as Nonya, which is why we couldnt see crispy duck anywhere on the menu!
The next day we headed out to find Penang hill on our own, after spurning the hotels offer of a taxi ride to the place. Local transport here we come!! We kinda found the bus station and after interpretting the bus maps we got queued up for a bus...... most of the locals waiting with us seemed determined to push past us until we were last in the queue. Anyway the driver said we were in the right place and we got on. The driver signalled about half
an hour later to get off, and we started searching for the Penang Hill railway which should be near. It wasnt obvious so we started asking people for the 'railway' or 'train' and getting some puzzling responses. We ended up climbing these steep stairs full of shops trying to sell us stuff..... Bex had seen a bracelet she quite liked and got told it was 60 Ringits which then she walked off at...... all you could hear up the stairs was 'okay - 30 ringits', 'okay 20ringits', 'okay 5 ringits'..... great bargaining by Bex! Anyway the puzzled looks led us to a tram (it certainly wasnt the train we were expecting and was very short) which went up a short slope to a temple high up in the hills. It wasnt quite the top of Penang Hill but gave us some good views over the capital. When we got back we realised we were in the wrong bit but had good fun out in the sticks!
We both quite like Penang as it has such a great mix of cultures and hence has a great selection of food to eat!! We found a great little night market full of
clean looking hawker stalls (serves really cheap food - spose to be the same as restaurants but without the airconditioned rooms or service) but we opted against trying it since we have a 9 hour bus ride tomorrow to the Perhentian islands. We should have stayed another nite maybe 2, as this quirky little place is a welcome change to Thailand.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.175s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 16; qc: 79; dbt: 0.1008s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
kimberley
non-member comment
me!
where ever you are, i'll always crop up unexpectedly! (well, not actually in person!) lol x