A Taste of India

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The island of Penang is just off the west coast of Malaysia, although it’s an island it can be reached by the one of the longest bridges in Asia. At 13.5 kilometres it spans the Straits of Melaka.



We arrived here after a 4-hour bus journey; a lot of the time was taken up by queuing up at immigration on the border between Thailand and Malaysia. Our mini bus, for once, was not overloaded. We, well Stan mostly, spent most of the 4 hours chatting to a Canadian fellow traveller; he was a frequent visitor to Penang and knew of a clean cheap safe guesthouse. He’d reserved a room but luckily for us they had another vacant room so we were sorted without having to tramp around. It’s always good to follow someone’s recommendation. Looking around this area we quickly realised there were some very seedy joints.



Penang has recently been granted a world heritage status so we’ve now swapped beaches for a bit of culture. Before sight seeing, however, our first job was to get a new transformer for the laptop. Ours got fried during the electrical storm on Ko Bulone Leh, which is one reason the blogs dried up for a while.



Success! We ended up in a huge Tesco store and got what we needed. I never thought I’d be in Tesco shopping whilst on this side of the world. Keeps me in touch with reality I guess.



We spent a day walking around the old Colonial Buildings of Georgetown. I could write about the history of it but it was so hot as we walked around and read the placards at each place that my brain was turning to mush. It was interesting at the time!



.We were staying in the ‘little India’ part of Penang. You could be forgiven for thinking you were actually in India itself. The spicy cooking smells filled the air from the many street cafes and Indian music blasted out from every shop doorway. Colourful Indian Saree shops were abundant.

It made sense to try out some Indian restaurants, The prices were so cheap we were able to experiment with new foods, my favourite restaurant was a vegetarian, the Indians are so good at making tasty dishes out of vegetables. We ate like kings all for less than £4 between us.



Our time in Penang was intentionally short, next stop in Kuala Lumpur then Ho Chi Ming City (Saigon) Vietnam. By then we will be all ‘citied out’.

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