The halfway stage!

Trip Start Sep 19, 2002
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Trip End Sep 22, 2003


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Flag of Malaysia  ,
Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Our journey from the Cameron Highlands took us back along that awful route down the mountain. The driver tried to light cigarettes only on the most dangerous bits so we guess he must have been scared too. 6.5 hours later we arrived in Penang, an island just off Butterworth. As usual I couldn't be bothered to walk and we had been approached by a taxi driver so Pip looked over my shoulder and agreed a price. I couldn't work out why he asked if we would fit until I saw our vehicle which Pip had already seen - a trishaw! Each of us struggle with our own bags but this old man had both of us and all of our bags in the little compartment of his bicycle. I was highly embarassed as I didn't think we would move at all but we made it to our hotel. Jalan Chulian is the road where all the budget places are (and therefore all the cheap eats and internet places) and we booked into the Oasis Hotel which is in Love Lane (aahhh) just off the main road. It has a bath but doesn't have hot water (typical) and is probably the grottiest place we have stayed so far. Mouldy walls and an outside toilet (en-suite just meant the bath) no air con and no covers but it was friendly and only cost 30RM per night(5 pounds). Our host, Raj, had beautiful eyes and was quite taken with Pip's 'pretty' te-shirt. He spent most of the evening chatting up one of the other male guests (Raj not Pip) and I had to stand in for him on the desk while he took him to the bank (I didn't ask why he needed money so late at night....) We ate really cheaply and the internet is only 1RM per hour (about 16p) so we should make up some of the money we've been spending on trips and flights recently.

18th March - Sightseeing day! Started off in the museum which was small but lavish and very quiet until a group of American / Chinese children came in on a school trip (this always happens to us in museums). Suddenly we heard a crash and discovered that one of them had tripped over a 1830's pot and shattered it. They were asked politely to leave. We saw them go next door to St George's church but the only original thing left here after the war is the Bishop's chair and we couldn't stand to see it broken so we continued on to Fort Cornwallis. This is where the British first landed but there isn't much there at all apart from walls and a few cannons. We sat on the waterfront (looking at the VERY dirty debris filled water) and reminisced about our honeymoon 4.5 years ago when we sat in exactly the same place. We then visited various temples, mosques and clan houses, some spectacular, some not so. One was the dirtiest we have seen so far and people were not even taking their shoes off for fear the beggars might steal them. We did see a bit of a Chinese puppet show here which was a little like punch and Judy and we still couldn't understand what they were saying. In the evening we visited one of the many bars / cafes featuring films, some that have only just been released at the cinema but the quality of this particular one was appalling and it was hard to hear over the noise of the traffic. When we came out, Georgetown was a different place. The streets were full of dogs, prostitutes and lady-boys and Pip remarked that he couldn't tell the difference. Bitch!

19th March - The only sight we wanted to see that wasn't near us was the Kek Lok Si temple which is the biggest Buddhist temple complex in South East Asia. We caught a bus there and then climbed through the steep shopping arcade which felt rather like running the gauntlet as the shopkeepers waken from their sleep and shout "te-shirt, you buy sir, very cheap sir". The religious parts of the temple were very interesting although some had really seem better days. There were monks and nuns tending the amazing flowers and hundreds of little Buddhas in the, urm, Hundred Buddha pagoda. We went up in the diagonal lift to the huge statue of the Goddess of Mercy and looked out over the high rises of Penang and out to the sea. Miraculously we caught a bus straight away back into the town which cost us another 20 sen each as it was air conditioned!

As this is officially the halfway stage for us (can you believe we have been away for 6 whole months???!!!), we celebrated by having a small Tiger beer and watched Catherine Zeta-Jones strutting her stuff in Chicago. This was better quality than the previous evenings film but had rather odd English subtitles (the film was still in english). The author obviously worked purely by the sound of the words and they didn't always match. The best error was Catherine shouting something about ".....saving your ass" which was sub-titled as "....shaving your ass"!
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