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Published: March 29th 2012
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It was a short five minute walk from Butterworth train station to the ferry and a quick ride across to the island of Penang where I jumped off and made my way to "Love Lane" - the hub of budget backpacker accommodation in Georgetown. Lonely Planet advocates taking the bus but this is surely for the only truly lazy traveller... ten minutes walking and I was there and checking into Reggae Guest House which had been recommended to me by a fella in KL. It was a nice sociable place with free internet and breakfast and a pool table downstairs and I stayed there 5 nights.
Georgetown was a very comfortable place to stay for a while. It was easily navigable on foot and it was hard not to find something to like. Above all, the city is famous for its cuisine supposedly having the best food in Malaysia. I could see why. It's a lot of fun being in a place where essentially the main task of the day is 'eat'... that's a "To Do" list even I can deal with! So not wanting to waste the opportunity I duly obliged and filled up on some great
curries in Little India and awesome local fare at the Red Garden food court, a self-confessed "food paradise". There was a great selection of dishes. Just order what you want, give them the table number and then sit back and enjoy the, erm, "entertainment".
Georgetown also has a heap of historical buildings all conveniently located close to each other making it easy to see to main sights - the City Hall, Town Hall and seafront promenade - in a couple of hours. I also went to the top of the KOMTAR tower, Penang's tallest building, and from the 60th floor I got a great view of the city and the surrounding hills although it isn't a panoramic view as for some reason they'd closed off the east-facing side. Still worth going up though. The city in general was a real cultural potpourri with St George's Church on one street, a Hindu Temple just round the corner and then Keling Mosque another couple of minutes down the road.
One of the days there I shared a scooter with a roommate from the hostel (my third scooter adventure of the trip) and headed west along the
coastal road to the Penang National Park. Of course we got lost leaving the city... what is it with these cities and their silly one way systems? The way you're allowed to go is never the direction you wanna go in! Still, once we made it to the right road it was plain sailing with some nice views along the way. We parked up at the entrance and strolled through the control desk where I'm sure there's usually someone sat charging an admission fee. The trek through the jungle wasn't so easy in the heat although the ground was dry and fairly flat which helped. If I remember it took us just over two hours to go from the entrance all the way across the park and pop out the other side at the Pantai Kerachut beach - a very pleasant beach with very few people and also a nesting site for turtles. The problem was that we'd started the day a bit late and by the time we hit the beach our concern was making it back before sunset. We had no torches so making the same trek back in the dark would've been scary to say the least.
We got lucky in the end though and an entire family who had been picnicking on the beach and who had radioed ahead for a boat to pick them up kindly let us share the ride. It was a life-saver and a potentially dodgy two and a half hour trek back through the jungle turned into an enjoyable and relaxing 15-minute boat ride back around the coast line straight to the village where we'd left the scooter... the 10 best spent Ringgits of the day!
Another day there I took a local bus with some other hostel folk over to Penang Hill about one hour west of town. The view from the KOMTAR tower was good but from Penang Hill it was possible to see back across the whole of Georgetown, the Batu Feringgi area, Penang Bridge and the North and South channels. The bus dropped us a few minutes walk from the entrance where the awfully-named "funicular" train leaves taking people up and down the hill. By this point I'm used to the Lonely Planet guide being a bit inaccurate with its prices. It was published two years ago so there's bound to have been some
increase... I paid 34 Ringgits for my train ticket up to Butterworth from KL when the guide said 19. And now, a one-way fare on the funicular train that was 4 Ringgits two years ago is now 17 Ringgits! That's more than a 300% increase in two years! The plan was to take the train up and walk back down and it worked out pretty well although my recommendation, if it's possible, would be to take the train up with a mountain bike and then cycle back down. It was paved the whole way and it would've made the descent a hell of a lot more fun and significantly easier on the legs! The views were great from the top though and we spent a good while there before descending down (about two and half hours) towards Kek Lok Si Temple - the largest Buddhist Temple in Malaysia. We made it but not in time and had to contend with seeing it from below.
Georgetown was a fun place to be and I'd recommend it to anyone passing through Malaysia. Early morning on Wednesday 29th February I took a mini-van service. My destination - Krabi on Thailand's Andaman Coast.
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