Snakes and Sunsets

We had another long day of travelling, we stopped overnight in a town about 5 miles from the Malaysian border. The next morning we went and had our passports stamped and entered Malaysia, 1 hour on the other side of the border and the bus was stopped by some local police who decided to check everyone’s passports, we were told to keep an eye on our passports even when the police had them. We travelled for another 2 hours before we reached our destination of Penang an island 3Km away from the mainland at its closest point, we had to go over the Penang bridge which is 13Km long.



After lunch we took a wander around Georgetown, the capital of Penang, it is a mix of colonial and shanty buildings. Kit had given us a list of places to visit, we decided to visit most of them the next day. We did visit ‘Fort Cornwallis’ which was the fort of Penang when the British colonised it. As we entered the fort we were met by a lady dressed in a period costume and told we could get our photo taken wearing colonial hats and holding a rifle. We headed back to the hotel after looking around the museum in the fort. After freshening up Kit told us he knew of a great Indian restaurant, which served food on banana leaves instead of plates.



Afterwards kit took us to a night club which was ok but in Malaysia they add 40% tax on alcohol so it’s not cheap to drink, we ended up getting a few bottles of spirits and sitting on the roof of the hotel playing poker until 2am. Whilst on the way back to the hotel Paul bought a tub of Durian, which is a local fruit which is supposed to be very tasty but smells absolutely disgusting (to me it smelt of gone off mango). He took a small piece and put it into his mouth next thing we know he spits it back out. We could smell the Durian on him and so made him go wash his hands and buy some extra strong mints to mask the smell. One of the locals saw what happened and was very happy to take the tub away from Paul and eat it himself.



The next morning Paul, Lisa, Anna, Tj and I headed out quite early for a packed day of sightseeing. To start with we made our way to the snake temple which believe it or not had lots of snakes in it. We decided to visit the botanical gardens, as we pulled up in the taxis we saw signs telling us not to feed the monkeys. As we entered the park the monkeys were all around us, we started taking pictures of the ‘cute’ Monkeys but then they turned evil. Anna had bought some syrup and ash trays as souvenirs and was carrying them in a plastic bag, in a flash one of the monkeys jumped at Anna and grabbed the bag, we tried to get it back but the monkey just hissed at us and showed his teeth. Then the monkey opened the bottle of syrup and drank it. We managed in the end to get the ash trays back, and now understand why so many people in the park carry sticks. After all the excitement we headed over to the peak, the highest point in Penang. We wanted to watch the sun set over Penang and were told this was the place to do it, but we didn’t realise how high and scary it was to get there. We had to get 2 cable cars which went up a very steep incline. It was worth it though.