Georgetown, Penang

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OK I haven't been the best at keeping this up to date but there is too much food to eat rather than writing blogs! Anyway here are another couple of entries and I'll try to catch up to where we are now soon.

Our trip to Georgetown, Penang was one of the worst journeys we've done on our trip.

It took 16 hours to get from Surat Thani to our hostel. The first leg was a mini bus down to Hat Yai, the last big town before you reach the Malaysian border. We made good progress to here and we were dropped off on a street with a load of travel agents offering trips to Penang, we just had to find the best priced one and the one leaving next. That was the problem, they were all fully booked, how this was possible I don't know but every agency we went into offered transport but as soon as they made a phone call to book us in they all said no its fully booked. Frustrated and a little annoyed we only had one other idea which was to go to the train station as I had read there were more agencies there offering the journey to tourists getting off the train. Luckily this paid off, despite a tuk tuk over charging us to take us just around the corner because we had no idea where the station was, we found an agency that still had space.

This was to leave at half 3 and should take 4-5 hours to Georgetown. Well we actually got picked up early about 3:10pm but we didn't get to our hostel until 11pm! A mixture of waiting to pick more people up, hitting horrendous traffic jams at the border, queueing to go through the border (Carly picked the wrong que to go in) and then dropping people all over the island of Penang before finally getting to Georgetown. We slept well that night.

As for Georgetown itself we weren't that impressed, Penang is well known for being one of the food capitals of Asia and the street food is meant to be some of the best. We have had much better food in lots of other places and it was difficult to even find places to eat at lunchtime. We did find an amazing Indian restaurant for our final night, we wished we had found it sooner and we would have worked our way through the menu! There wasn't really anything else to say about Georgetown.

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Comments

[laurawhite]

Good eats Georgetown
That's such a shame! I really enjoyed Georgetown, but did think that the more popular places were way overpriced (China House, am looking at you). Luckily my hostel recommended some amazing places to eat, so actually had a good experience there.