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Published: June 18th 2017
In my last post I mentioned how I skipped Khanom and its pink dolphins due to what was, in effect, a combination of apparent-difficulty and probable-expense. Another place I had on my plan but dropped before leaving Bangkok was Langkawi Island. After crossing the border from Thailand I was going to go straight to Kuala Perlis and get a ferry to Langkawi, and then from there go to Penang. I've always wanted to go to Langkawi - most of the island is still forest and it is reportedly a good site for small-clawed otters which would be a lifer for me. One day I really need to do it at the start of a trip, because by the end of a trip when I try to tag it on I'm already too low on funds to go.
Getting to the island is cheap enough, but there is no budget accommodation on the island and also no public transport. For the otters you could just try wandering about, but a better way is to go on one of the mangrove boat tours which are around 160 Ringgits per person. That's really where most of the expense comes into it. With that
and the accommodation and other such things, even a couple of days would set me back a week's budget. I emailed JungleWalla Tours a couple of years ago and they said they see otters on about 50% of their trips, but I think they are most commonly smooth-coated otters. Not that there's anything wrong with smooth-coated otters, it is just that I've seen those before so for my money I'd be wanting to see small-clawed otters. One day I'll get there. It is also one of the easiest places to see colugos apparently, for anyone who wants to see one of those.
So with Langkawi discarded for now, I instead went straight to Penang. A mini-van from Songkhla to Hat Yai for 34 Baht (one hour) and then another mini-van from Hat Yai to the Dannok border for 57 Baht (also one hour) was quick and easy. But on the Malaysian side of the border there is nothing. On the Thai side there's a whole town directly next to the immigration checkpoint, but when you get onto the Malaysian side there are no shops, no ATMs, no buses - just ten kilometres of empty road to the town of
Changlun. There's no choice but to pay for a taxi if you are like me and have crossed the border on foot. It wasn't too expensive at 20 Ringgits (there are three Ringgits to one NZ Dollar) but I'd rather there had been a bus!
I got dropped at the Changlun bus station where my intention was to get a bus to Butterworth, from where I could get the ferry across to Penang Island. There was no bus to Butterworth. Or, rather, there was a bus but not until 6.30pm. It was only 11am (I later realised my watch was, of course, still on Thai time which is an hour behind Malaysia, so it was actually noon). I went round each of the ticket stands, but no dice. Was there a bus to Alor Setar, which is half-way and from where there are more regular buses? Not until 2pm, but I'd have to wait and see if there were any free seats. A taxi would cost me 50 Ringgit I was told. I looked around and surprisingly saw another backpacker walking into the bus yard. I asked where he was going. Penang. Did he want to split the taxi
fare instead of waiting three hours for the bus? Sure. I didn't really want to pay another taxi fare but I also didn't want to wait three hours for a mini-van which may not even have any seats. And it turned out that Alor Setar is almost 50km from Changlun so it was a pretty good price really.
It was about half an hour to Alor Setar by taxi (an hour by bus apparently), and at the bus station there were buses running every hour to Butterworth. They only cost 11 Baht and take an hour. Then from Butterworth I just popped across the strait on the ferry and spent yet another hour walking round and round the streets of Georgetown trying to find somewhere cheap enough to sleep! There were several hotels named "Budget Hotel" - their rooms were 80 Ringgits. Some had dorms for 30 Ringgits. I wasn't paying 30 Ringgits to sleep in a room with six other people. Eventually I found a place called Eng Loh Hotel which has very basic and run-down rooms for 30 Baht. Good enough for me. It is actually on the same street as the place I stayed last time
I was in Penang, the Couzi Couji. In 2014 this was named "Couzi Couji: Party Hostel" - now it is named "Couzi Couji: Boutique Hostel"! Their prices are the same as the "Budget Hotels".
I was hoping to sneak in a quick lifer mammal on my first day in Malaysia. In a trip-report I had read that yellow house bats could be seen emerging from a temple on Jalan Muntri in the evening while it was still light enough to identify them by colour (with binoculars). This street was only about five minutes walk from my hotel, so I went over there before dark. I waited a while and eventually saw a few bats flying around up in the sky. It was light enough to see them, but they were against the sky so even with binoculars they just looked like small dark bats. No way to identify them like that. No bats came out of the temple or the other buildings either, they were just flitting around quite high in the air. I tried again the next evening with the same non-result.
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First stop in Penang was the Penang Bird Park, one of my favourite
animal collections in southeast Asia. Jurong is undoubtably better as a bird collection, but Penang is much better than the KL Bird Park. And I prefer Penang over most of the zoos I've visited too. I am a bird person, of course, but even so it is just so much easier to spend time amongst the aviaries. I spent three hours there on this visit, and it's only a five acre site. Compare that with my four hours at the 360-acre Songkhla Zoo. Partly that was due to the condition of Songklha now, but also because Penang is vastly more interesting.
For this visit I discovered that the buses to get there from the station at Butterworth (just by the ferry terminal for Penang Island) are now numbers 709 and 703. Last time it was bus number 209. The route is exactly the same now on the 709 so I think they have just changed the numbering system (either that or I was confused last time and thought 709 was 209 somehow). Anyway, it is two Ringgits for the fare and it takes about twenty minutes, followed by a five minute walk. On the return I caught the 203
bus which took twice as long on a meandering route back to the station.
The basics of the Bird Park remain the same. Two of the aviary blocks (the first primarily for peacock-pheasants and the second for cockatoos) are now glass-fronted. I can't actually remember if they were mesh or glass before to be honest. However the reflections off the glass are terrible. As I mentioned in the last review, there are some difficulties in viewing the birds due to glare off the mesh, and glass fronts are ten times worse. However, it's the tropics - I think the only way around glare would be to put awnings over all the paths to cut out the sun.
The duck collection has decreased dramatically, for reasons I'm unclear on. The pheasant collection is as large as previously, and the parrot collection has increased by a few species. A fantastic new addition to the collection is a pair of helmeted hornbills, currently separated in adjoining aviaries. They are absolutely magnificent!
There is a nice waxbill and whydah aviary where I spent quite a bit of time trying to see all the species (I missed a couple). The aviary was
mostly quite sparsely-furnished but at one end was a large plant in which most of the species I wanted to see were perched - and the plant was right behind all the signage which obscured the view!
There are now three walk-through aviaries (last time two). Of the two which were there previously, one is much better now, with the turkeys and ring-necked pheasants inhabiting it having been replaced with a much more varied collection including flocks of pigeon species. The second walk-through aviary was lessened for me, though, because that was the one which on my 2014 visit had large numbers of ashy minivets and drongo cuckoos, all now gone. The aviary is still good - it has lots of red-whiskered bulbuls and other birds, but those other two species really made it special. The third (new) walk-through aviary is probably the best of the three, being heavily-planted and able to be viewed on two levels. There were 27 species signposted, mostly passerines, although I didn't see them all.
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On the following day I planned on going up to Penang Hill early in the day to look for birds and mammals. Penang Hill is 830
metres high and cooler than the city - the British used it as one of their hill-stations for convalescing. Today it is one of the main tourist attractions. At the top there is a small aviary collection which I thought I'd check out, and an Owl Museum.
So I took bus number 204 from the bus/ferry terminal complex which is maybe five minutes walk from my hotel. All the Rapid Penang buses seem to be two Ringgits for whichever route you take. Or maybe that is just a tourist fare. It is 45 minutes to the bottom of Penang Hill where there is a funicular station - a funicular is a cable-railway up a sloping track. There I discovered that the funicular fare is 30 Ringgits for foreigners (versus 10 for locals). I did not want to pay 30 Ringgits to go to the top of a hill - that's a night's accommodation, or something like five or six meals. But more so, I did not want to pay three times what a local would be paying for the exact same seat. That's outrageous. Being a stubborn sod, I went and got back on the bus.
Instead I
went to the Botanical Gardens. To get there I had to go all the way back to town - although I got off at the Komtar Station which is more central - and got the bus number 10. From Komtar to the gardens was close to an hour's trip, so by the time I got to there it was 11am. There were a number of commoner birds around but really it was a bit too hot. I decided to just look for colugos.
First mammal of the day was a troop of crab-eating macaques climbing about on the fernery roof. I took a set of steps leading up into forest and came across a plantain squirrel running through the trees. The trail was nice - I imagine early morning it would be a great place for birds. Unexpectedly, I found a trilobite larva on a rotting log. Trilobite larvae are not, obviously, actual larvae of trilobites, but rather a bizarre kind of beetle which looks sort of like a trilobite.
After two hours of scanning all the trees in the forest I found a colugo. If you don't know what a colugo is, imagine an animal kind of
like a flying squirrel except creepy-looking instead of cute, with bulbous unblinking eyes. They are strictly nocturnal so during the day they just cling to tree trunks, their mottled fur blending them in against the lichen-covered bark. I've seen lots of colugos but they are really neat animals and I like to look for them whenever I'm in colugo-country. Because they literally never move during the day they aren't that easy to find, even where they are common. You have to spend a lot of time staring at trees.
There were several reptiles around the place, including a flying dragon, a clouded monitor up a tree in the forest and a water monitor by a stream, and a lot of red-eared terrapins in one of the ponds. On the way out of the gardens I came across a pair of dusky langurs feeding in a low tree on one of the lawns, making the fourth mammal for the day.
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Lastly for the Penang part of this trip, I went on a day-trip to Taiping to visit the zoo. I have been to Malaysia many times, but somehow have never made it to the Taiping Zoo. It
is the oldest zoo in the country, having being opened in 1961, and yet was supposed to be amongst the best in Malaysia (and Asia) so this trip I made sure I got there.
Taiping is only two hours from Penang but the buses are infrequent. I had checked the day before at the station and found only two companies doing the route. Starmart's bus left at 9am while the earliest Konsortium bus was 10.30am. Both of them actually went to a town called Kumanting, and from there you have to take a local bus the last few kilometres to Taiping itself. I turned up at 8.30am the next morning and bought a ticket for the 9am bus. At 9.15am I checked with the lady at the ticket counter when the bus would be there. "A few minutes" she said. At 9.40am I checked again. "A few minutes" she said. At 9.45am I realised that the conductor for a nearby Konsortium bus was yelling "Kumanting! Kumanting!" to attract any last-minute stragglers. I rushed over, he said he would wait, and I ran back inside to get a ticket for that bus instead. The lady at the Starmart counter refused to give me a refund on the other ticket, despite their bus not having turned up. It was only an 8 Ringgit ticket, but it effectively meant that I'd had to pay twice to get to Taiping.
The zoo isn't very big - only 34 acres - and it is designed entirely around a winding loop road, so it is very easy to walk around and not miss anything. There's a shuttle too, but it's not necessary unless you're infirm. It didn't take me long to get round the zoo, partly because it isn't very big, partly because I don't stay long at the enclosures for uninteresting animals like elephants or tigers, and partly because there were rather a lot of unoccupied enclosures.
It is definitely a great zoo, quite possibly the best in Malaysia, and easily in the top rankings in all of Asia. It certainly doesn't look like it hails from 1961. The grounds are fantastic - all jungle - and I saw three species of wild monkeys while there (crab-eating macaque, southern pig-tailed macaque, and dusky langur). There can't be many zoos in the world where that is possible.
A lot of the enclosures are cages, but almost all are at least "large" in size, many of them very large, and many of them also glass-fronted. When discussing the Penang Bird Park earlier I commented on how in the tropics there's nothing that can be done about the glare issue off glass or wire apart from putting awnings in front of the cages. That is exactly what Taiping Zoo has done, and it works brilliantly. No glare. Even the glass-fronted cages had perfect viewing. A lot of the open enclosures had awnings or viewing shelters as well, so you don't need to be standing in the sun all day.
Taiping Zoo does like its mixed exhibits. The first walk-in aviary you come to was labelled as holding lesser mouse deer, small-clawed otter, island fruit bat, lesser short-nosed fruit bat, green heron and black-naped oriole. The only species I could see (from outside the aviary, but I could see the whole area) were the short-nosed fruit bats, what looked like a greater mouse deer, a green heron, a cattle egret, and a couple of Asian brown tortoises. Another very large enclosure filled with jungle and glass-fronted (but open-topped) was labelled as holding dhole (which I saw) and binturong (which I didn't). This enclosure previously held civets, leopard cats, muntjac, binturong and two porcupine species.
There is an amazing African Savannah exhibit, with flocks of greater flamingoes and yellow-billed storks gracing the shoreline, and giraffes, zebra and antelope in the centre (as well as wild dusky langurs in the trees in the middle). The grass in this exhibit is vibrantly green, and really the entire zoo is like being in a botanic gardens with animals. It actually is a "zoological gardens".
Really my only criticism of the zoo overall is that there were quite a number of empty enclosures, presumably where animals had died and not been able to be replaced for whatever reason. There was also a complicating issue in that the zoo is open at night, and there are some shift-changes in the cage occupants, so it wasn't always clear if a cage was completely unoccupied or simply that it just had no day-occupant.
Much more unusually (and somewhat aggravatingly) there were several identification signs still in place for animals which were long dead. The last flat-headed cat died last year, the last red hartebeest probably the year or two before that, and the banded palm civet and cassowary several years prior - yet all still have signs in place. In the case of the banded palm civet the cage itself was gone, so there was just a sign standing uselessly in front of concrete foundations surrounding undergrowth. The red hartebeest (labelled as being in with the white rhinos) was particularly galling because I have never seen a hartebeest.
I've been to some other zoos where large numbers of empty cages ruined the visit (recently Songkhla Zoo and, less-recently, Melaka Zoo) but here - while the absent animals were noticeable - it didn't detract too much because the grounds of the zoo itself are so nice and the exhibitry is much more appealing in total. It is definitely a zoo I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anyone.
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juvenile Malay Eagle Owl (Bubo sumatranus)
