Blogs from George Town, Penang, Malaysia, Asia - page 49

So after a final farewell(for now) to Thailand i head into Malaysia. Again my idea of malaysia was way off the mark and this country (from what i saw anyway) has better infrastrucutre than back home and is a prospering country. I only had 10 days to see this country so i would only see a fraction of it. I decided to vist Penang island and Kuala Lumpar. Malaysia is a great place with 3 races living and working happily together. The Malay, the chinese and the Indans. I did not get the impression there was any tension between any of them and they were all proud to be known as malaysian. There are alot of countries i can think of that could learn from how they live together. Anyway so i headed from the border ... read more

The road to Penang turned out to be very comfortable indeed, courtesy of the Super VIP Konsortium Bas Ekspres. We decided that the extra one pound 50 pence would be wisely invested in the aforementioned service, that came complete with airline super snoozer seats and individual entertainment console......and before we knew it, we were at the bus station on Penang Island. The scenery en route was more of the previous in peninsula Malaysia, although generally it was a lot drier than anticipated. The express bus station on Penang is about 12 kms outside of Georgetown, which leaves you with limited choice but to get a taxi (at least, if you are carrying your backpacks and it's 90 degrees). The taxi ride therefore costs about 2/3 of the price of the bus ticket from KL and there ... read more

Yet again an early start - this time to go and see a temple! We got taxi's which took us to the temple, waited an hour while we looked around and then dropped us at the blue mansion (a house built by someone famous who had several wives and has something to do with Feng Shui!) The temple was very impressive and there was a massive bronze statue. The housing around the statue was still under construction and you were able to buy tiles to eventually go on the roof and help them fund the project. Mel, Chris (one of the London Lads) and I decided to buy a tile and had our names and the date written on it! The blue mansion wasn't quite as impressive! You had to get a guided tour around the ... read more

Ok so we set of on the minibus to the Maly border, at which point i noticed that the driver of the bus had grown his little finger nail to about an inch in length whilst having trimmed the rest of them, and i remembered something Sharn had said about the travel company never doing journeys at night because of the drivers doing speed to keep awake. So i whispered quite worriedly to Charlie that this guy had grown a coke spoon! It wasn't until about a week later that i would find out from Sharn that this was for two completely different reasons; the first being that in chinese-malay culture it's considered unlucky to have your little finger smaller in length than your ring finger so people grow their nails, the second being that it's ... read more

It has been a little while since we last updated the blog. Firstly, Happy New Year to all! We spent Christmas Day in Ko Samui, lazing on the beach, having a massage. I am the only person on the beach that needs to be covered with a towel as they have goose bumps! We rounded the day off with an Italian meal on the beachfront. Not traditional I know, but our first taste of pasta in nearly two months! It was good, and was washed down with some red wine! From Ko Samui we were in search of a quieter beach, and headed to Ao Nang on the other side of the Thai peninsula. We had been told to be ready for a 6.30am pick up, so we sat up at the reception waiting for the ... read more