Penang!

After seven long years of waiting, many moving of houses, and much teasing from Colin about the downfall of my beloved island, I am finally back in Penang!

Arriving in the airport after our short flight from Singapore, a flood of memories hit me. The shops, the waiting halls, the taxi stand, even the view of the green island and lovely blue seas as we are landing. But, in the taxi on the way to the hostel (in the centre of Georgetown, the main city of Penang and an area I hardly ever ventured into before) the years that have passed become more obvious. More rustic than KL or Singapore, Penang has many more Chinese temples, little shops, dirtier streets and old, rather dilapidated malls. After we checked in I was eagerer to see my parts of the island again, and so we headed out on foot to walk the cornice towards my old apartment building.

On the way we passed Wat Chayamangkalaram, a Chinese temple with the third (I think) largest reclining Buddha statue. The temple was beautiful, with the red and gold decorations everywhere that you think only exist in the movies. Unfortunately the minister or something was visiting so we weren't allowed inside the main part where the golden statue was, but we could see it well enough through the windows. From there it was just a short walk to my old apartment building.

I managed to sweet talk the security guard into letting Rory and me enter unescorted, and we walked round the beautiful swimming pool in the centre to our old ground floor apartment- Mum, it is exactly the same as it used to be! I wont bore everyone with the details, but it was amazing to be back there with all the memories flooding back (like all those times May and I beat Colin at table tennis, or my14th birthday party etc). We then walked down the road to Uplands school. This was a bit more heartbreaking. The primary school has indeed been knocked down and the front of the old secondary school blocked from view by a new modern glass filled building selling houses and apartments. I was disappointed, but forewarned about this destruction of history(!), and took comfort in the fact that later I could walk round the back to see it in full.

We then wandered over to Midlands plaza. This place is nothing special, only to me as a place where I would spend almost everyday after school with my friends. However, the warnings Colin etc gave me still didn't prepare me for the downfall of the mall. With more than half the shops closed, and my favourites lost forever, the visit to Midlands was nothing more than depressing. However I took comfort in the building itself and the few shops that had survived (McDonalds, KFC and a couple of DVD shops) and Rory fully enjoyed himself by purchasing many (cheap!) computer games and cartridges for his new Gameboy. At least the less-than-legal side of Midlands is still flourishing!

A short walk away from Midlands lies the culprit of the downfall of the old Malls. The new mall. Gurney Plaza. Large, fully air conditioned, new and full of western (as well as a few local) shops, this is the new hang-out for the locals who turn there noses up at the old. To be honest, it is pretty nice. We wandered around for a bit before deciding to give our feet a rest in the (as usual) cinema. After the film (Disturbia- weird but pretty good), we brought some snacks and drinks and took a taxi back to the hostel, Hutton Lodge.

Day two. After a simple yet pleasant breakfast of toast and banana cake at the hostel, we waited out the heat of the day relaxing and reading up about what tourist stuff we wanted to do on the Island. We decided on Penang Hill first, and took a taxi to the funicular railway station. We brought tickets for the next available train (in an hour and a half, they are only small things), and wandered the area. We stumbled across a 110 year old small Chinese temple, built into and around a cave in Penang Hill called the Bat Temple. When we went inside we discovered it was accurately named, as on the roof of the cave slept many black bats! The women who ran the temple told us the cave was best at dawn or dusk, when hundreds of the little animals fly in and out through the temple to the cave.

The funicular railway ride up the hill was unfortunately also less spectacular than it used to be. What was once a peaceful beautiful ride up the hill was now a game of 'how many people can we fit in each carriage'. The answer: too many. More than the recommended maximum allowance that the 50 year old trains were made for anyway, which made it a bit of a thrill ride. However my years in India prepared me for this, and I elbowed my way though to reserve us each a seat by the window, where the views were as spectacular as usual. At the top, when you look past the hundreds of signs telling people not to litter or feed the monkeys (and then past the people feeding the monkeys), the whole of Georgetown makes a spectacular view. You can see the tall buildings, the little houses, the smaller hills, the temples and the long (once the longest in Southeast Asia, but it has long since lost that title) Penang bridge that joins the island to the mainland. We wandered around the top of the hill, looking at the view, the little stalls, and as usual trying to avoid that ever-present loud man with an extremely large snake from putting the fed-up looking poisonous animal on your shoulders. You have to love this part of the world!

Then we saw the sign. The sign that made Rory start to dribble. The sign that said 'Devonshire Cream teas'. The man at the gateway to this hilltop restaurant called Strawberry fields pleasantly explained the 5 ringget (70p) admission charge to this sanctuary as 'a way to keep out the common riff-raff' (if not in those exact words then something close but probably a bit more politically correct), which is of course taken off the price for Malaysia's best tea and scones with cream and jam. Which indeed they were, not that we had stumbled across another place that sells them in the month of travelling! The garden was beautiful, immaculately kept with jaw-dropping views of the island and scrumptious food, so we stayed for a late lunch/early dinner. It was then time to head back down the hill as the sun set, and back to the centre of Georgetown where we enjoyed a very well made Mojito and a banana split before bed.

I will write more on the last two days of Georgetown soon, as we are now off for a few days of beach life in Batu Ferringhi. Just to let you know there has been a change in plan- due to the excessively large price for renting a car for a few days, the two full day drives it would take and the reviews of Taman Negara we have heard, we have decided to instead take the ferry across to Langkawi, and do the beaches (and some jungle!) there, before fliying back to KL LCCT and on to Jakarta!