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We stayed a few nights in Penang, an island off the North-West coast of the Malaysia peninsular. Here we experiance a complete mix of cultures; traditional Malay, Chinease and Indian. Walking down a road surrounded by dim-sum restaurants, chinease lettering and shops, turn the corner and your in little India; busy, loud bangra music, saris, Indian restaurants... It really did feel like three cities in one.
The mix of different cultures means one very important thing, food and lots of it; Indian curries, naans, chippaties, tandori chicken, Malay hot and sour soups, satays, fried rice, Chinease Dim-Sum and noodles.... All of it completley authentic. We spent most evenings sampling food on the 'hawker' stools in the night market, some of it we liked, some we didn't, but all of it was a new sensation to our tastebuds. We stumbled across a dim-sum restaurant on one occasion, we though it must be good as it was full of Chinease people. No menus, just a guy wandering round with bamboo steamers full of little plates of freshly steamed food. Of course we didn't have a clue what any of it was and the staff knew little English, so we just pointed at
things we liked the look of - good fun and always a suprise. We seamed to spend a lot of time in Penang eating!
Aside from eating, we spent a day at the beach which was OK (nothing compared to Thailand). We also took a cool trip up Penang hill on some crazy railway. The views from the top across Penang where spectacular.
The funniest thing we did was take a tour of the streets on a tri-shaw bike thingy, wherby some poor guy pedalled at the back while we where pearched on a seat at the front. This meant we had a front row seat of everything, including the traffic which was on some occasions quite alarming. We survived.
A dash across to the east coast by overnight bus and then speedboat took us to the Perinthian islands. Another tropical paradise of white sandy beaches, light blue sea and rugged jungle interior. The water here was sublime, absolutly crystal clear making it amazing for snorkelling and diving. Although there was incredible snorkelling just a short walk form our hut, we wanted more so went on a snorkelling trip. It started off fairly normal, at our first
stop we saw loads of cool fish and some nice coral, but nothing spectacular. Our next stop was 'shark point'. As we found out 'shark point' is named so for a reason - there are sharks!! After a few minutes snorkelling we saw one - a black-tipped reef shark of about 4 or 5 feet long - incredible! And the day got even better; at the next stop 'turtle point' we swam with a massive green turtle, maybe 1m in diameter. Swimming literaly inches away when it came up for air, an amazing experiance. We stopped at a few other points and saw Napoleon fish, Barracudas, Nemos, Parrot fish and loads of others which we have forgotton the names of. The day ended relaxing at a sublime beach, the cliche 'perfect beach' - an icredible day.
Other days we spent chilling on the beach and watching wildlife outside our hut, and sometimes inside the hut! We saw monitor lizards about 4 or 5 feet long, massive spiders, butterflies and a pair of Geckos which apparently lived in our hut - we didn't mind as they spent there time eating all the bugs.
We experianced a full demostration of
the pleasure/pain theory on one of our last days on the islands - a pain day. We decided to take a walk in the Jungle, this meant one thing - mozzies, and lots of them. After almost being eaten alive we abandoned and went to relax on the beach - b@#stard mozzies! We took a swim to a nearby pier, during which we got stung by who knows what on several occasions, one of which was on my eye lid which subsequently swelled up like a golf ball (it seams OK now). Several stings later we were at the peir and performed some 'top bombing' into the sea. We decided it was not a good idea to swim back so walked along the peir instead. Half way along Hannah spotted it. A solitery, cute (or so we thought) monkey. We went to take a closer look and at this point the 'cute' mokey turned into the demon monkey! it bared its teeth and began to run at us, snarling and hissing - not good, neither of us fancied rabies. We ran, the mokey persued, we ran quicker, eventually the monkey stopped, probably throughly satisfied at the thought of scaring the
life out of two creatures at least 10x the size of it! To summarise - a pain day!
Back on the mainland now and Jungle railway to Taman Negara National Park tomo. We will miss the Perinthinas and will remember for its beauty both above and below the water.
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