Malaysia, Truly Asia...

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Naz:

From Krabi we headed down to Hat Yai in the South of Thailand for a one night stopover and then crossed the border the next day into Malaysia. When we arrived in Pulau Penang we were dropped off at a massive shopping centre so, after Ric stepped in a bag of curry straight off the bus, we decided to sample the Malay cuisine and headed straight to McDonalds... We then headed to Chinatown to see if we could find a place to stay. The streets on the way were disgusting, there were rats scurrying around and the place absolutely stunk! Anyway, we had heard good things about a place called Banana Guesthouse so headed there and because we were tired took a room without even looking at all the facilities... Bad decision! I am happy to slum it but one thing i need is a 'proper toilet' to have some nice me time, all this place had to offer was a hole in the middle of the shower that you have to squat over.... really hygienic and not verey practical when you have to be careful not to fall down the shithole when your showering! We stayed here one night and swiftly moved on.

We didn't have the best of starts and were ready to leave the next day but luckily we decided to give the place the benefit of the doubt and from day two things got a whole lot better. We met up with two italians that we had previously seen in Koh Phi Phi and we all decided to go to the Penang Botanical Gardens and check out a few of the famous temples. We went to the Lek Kok Si Buddhist Temple and also went to the reclining Buddha temple, they were both very impressive but it would take ages to describe them so I will let you look at some of the pictures. The next day we went jungle trekking in the Penang National Park, the aim was to find turtles but after 3 hours of trekking the fact that all we saw was some baby turtles in a water bath turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax.

That night we went out for dinner with some guys we met from the hostel, two italians, two argentinians, two americans, one korean and one spaniard. Personally I couldn't deal with one of the americans, he was 45 and trying to show off in front of the young uns... one particular cringeworthy moment was when it started thunder and lightning and he started shouting 'Lord strike me down, I am not worthy'.... Get a grip mate.

Penang was also where Ric started his holiday fling turned full on minging relationship full of PDA's and all night soul searching conversations... at this point all was fine but all was about to change (you will hear all about it in the next blog in Pulau Langkawi which will be published in a few days).

All in all, Penang was really cool for seeing culture and for seeing some of the real Malaysia but it certainly wasn't the most fun place we have visited thus far. Our next stop was Langkawi and this was very different...

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