Border run and historical lesson

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Because of the new visa rules we had to leave Thailand on 10 October to renew our passport visas. The easiest way to do this is to do a 'border run' - basically a couple of nights over the border and back in again. Our nearest border was Malaysia so we went Penang - an island a couple of hours south of the border. To split the journey up a bit we decided to have a night in Hat Yai, in the Louise Guest House again, on our way down.

We got the minivan south the next morning at 9am to get to Penang for lunch time - funny how we always seem to plan our arrival everywhere at the height of the midday sun!? We are quite familiar with Penang (Georgetown) so we were pleased to see our old favourite the Stardust Guesthouse is still there, on Chulia Street. The place has changed hands but is much the same (although not quite as clean as when mega cleaner Roomy was there). Ever the bargain hunters though we did a quick tour of the hotels around the block, and of course ended up back where we started, but for a cheaper price than first quoted - result!

Penang was one of the major British colonial centres in Malaysia after is was comandeered by Sir Francis Light for the East India Company in the 18th Century. The legacy is a lot of very beautiful, if decaying colonial style buildings. There are three main ethnic groups on Penang - Malays, Chinese and Indian. And you can see the influence of all the cultures throughout Georgetown, but especially in China Town and Little India. We went to the Penang museum to brush up on all this :-)

So we had seven nights in Penang, which is quite a lot for a city but it is nicer than most. The weather has been very temperamental for the week with thunder storms every night - just hope it doesn't follow us up to Koh Phi Phi (Karen and Ian). Mostly all we did in Penang was wander around, a bit of shopping, reading, scrabble and eat tandoori chicken.

Last time we were here we found a place called Yasmeens that was mentioned in the Lonely Planet. We nearly didn't go in as it looked so dodgy but the man on the door was so nice and the LP said it was good. We're soo glad that we did go in as it was our first discovery of the tandoori naan set. We tried a couple more tandoori places (and dishes) this time but my (Lisa) heart still belongs to Yasmeens - although Lee has defected to the Hot Wok!

One of the nights we got back to our guesthouse just in time to watch a huge parade of floats passing the front door. It was a buddhist celebration - we know that much - but it was a bit vague about what for, something to do with the 'child god'!? One of the boys that worked in the guesthouse is Chinese buddhist though and seemed to be enthusing the celebrations (with much alcohol) in the hope of making his son less crazy. We did meet his four year old son a couple of times and can vouch for his complete crazyness and sympathise.

After a week of smog and stifling heat though we were both pining to get back to a beach and cleaner air. We got our 60 day Thai visa sorted and booked our tickets to Krabi, this time straight through - 8 hours, at 5am ugh

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