Penang
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2010
1
4
38
Trip End
Nov 02, 2012
Pinang, Malaysia
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
The coach up to Penang was fine. Comfy seats, no crying babies, in fact, the only noise we had was Laura snoring occasionally but that was fine as she woke herself up when it got too loud anyway which was handy. The only problem we had was when we got dropped off. The problem being was that we had absolutely no idea where the hell we were. For all I knew it could've been downtown Bronx as that is pretty much what it resembled. No one spoke a word of English (how inconsiderate) apart from one Chinese lady who managed to say that we we would need to get a bus to Georgetown, our final destination. The bus stop we found was all very intimidating and wasn't helped by it being dark and the only other people at it were a gang of lads just sitting around staring at us. Luckily they didn't kill us but actually had the same problem as us as they were also on holiday and were trying to get to the stop just after ours. We teamed up and managed to fathom out a route to where we needed to go and by Jove it worked.
Penang is a a fantastic place. We stayed in a backpacker joint at the end of Love Lane in Georgetown for, a bank breaking, RM25 per night (£2.50 each). The place was clean enough but very basic but, for that price, you can't complain. The shared bathroom was an experience with the shower cubical having a rather large hole in the floor for a luxury toilet/shower 2 for 1 combo.....nice. Georgetown itself though is brilliant, loads of things to see with everything within a 10 minute walking distance. The weather was scorching too so, armed with factor 50 for our pasty white vitamin D lacking skin, we headed off to check them out.
Probably one of the first things you don't want to do when you go sightseeing on one of the sunniest, brightest days of your life is break your sunglasses. Fortunately I didn't but Laura obliged by sitting on them for me which was kind of her. I contemplated wearing them with one arm missing but remembering back to Benaccassim one year when a random girl who came away with us did do exactly that I remember deciding that she was obviously mental and binned them (I think she even wore them when one of the lenses fell out and so from a distance she looked like a pirate).
Georgetown is littered with temples and the best one we saw was the Khoo Kongsi Temple on Cannon Square. The place is immense and is the kind of thing you would expect to see at the top of a mountain in a kung foo movie with an old man with a long white building sitting inside. The RM10 we paid to get in was worth it at twice the price. Also at the top of the list of things to see was the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion. Again it was RM10 but you get an entertaining tour included about the 'Rockefeller of the East.' We got talked out of checking out Penang Hill by some Australian Tourists and with the cable car up there being now more and the heat killing us we decided to call it a day.
John
Comments
Loving the blog (even if it is making me want to puke with jealousy) and this post is particularly hilarious!
Well John needs to embellish the truth to be funny. It was actually him snoring of course and the div sat on his own glasses!