PENANG

A friend and I availed ourselves of the wondrous AirAsia’s service this weekend and took a trip to Penang. If you time it right, you can fly to many places in Asia for less that AU$100, and we did, so we did.

Penang’s one messed up city. There’s massive colonial building in good shape, in bad shape, slum areas, huge new hotels, old hotels in need of some paint, and every gradation of residential housing in between. Exactly why there are new hotels I don’t understand, as it seems to be a backpacker place if anything on the tourist route.

There are three major ethnic groups – Malay, Chinese and India, though from the museum’s info it seems like everyone was here at some point due to British trade in the region. The Indian quarter of town is all colourful building and cooking everywhere. We ate nearly entirely Indian as its one of our few chances eat good Indian (I’m a bit over rice and noodles).

Georgetown (the major city) itself doesn’t have that much to see – we went up the hill to look at the view and wandered around to check out what there was, but its good for a change.

On the Sunday we went to Langkawi, an island about 3 hours away, as we discovered after being advised by guidebooks and travel agents its only 2 hours.

The first beach we went to was pure white sands, blue waters and limestone islets within touching distance, backed by rainforest-covered hills. Paradise, we could have stayed there all day except for the jellyfish. We drove around to four more beaches that day, but none were as beautiful as the first.

The last beach had a campsite right up on it, in which about 10 Muslim families had come for holiday. The kids played on the beach, all in full-length clothing and the girls in hijab. They must have been so hot and just dying to get in the water, but there didn’t seem to be any complaint and they all ran around the beach playing games, hide-and-seek maybe.

On our way back from Langkawi night fell and an almighty storm rolled in. We watched it roll from the horizon towards us, blackening as it did. The sky was dark long before the sun went down. The water turned a deep charcoal grey, and the horizon receded in upon us the closer the storm came and took on a hard black edge. The storm spread its canopy over our boat, but dropped ran further away. We watched the lightning for two hours as it lit up the contours of the clouds in an infinite variety of ways.

We stopped at the Snake Temple on the way to the airport – a Buddhist temple with a live collection of vipers. The collection amounted to 4, but they are venomous and free to roam the temple, though their version of roaming seemed to involve a lot of sitting next to candles. You can pay to have one put on your head and a photo taken, but I chose to pass on that wonderful experience.