Laughing at foreigners

Of course one of the joys of being oversees is laughing at the 'silly' names & wierd signs, such as the tempting 'Great Oil Stick' cafe

along with it's mouth-watering symbol

For those who prefer a taste of home, there's the 'Old Trafford Burger

and you can even get a Northern English plumber

"Fook Man, that's gonna cost ya"

Of course the Australian way of speaking is also an easy target

This is my favourite though, a poster in the centre of Georgetown

Not much you can add to that.

Buddha Buddha Buddha

On my last day in Penang I visited a couple of the Buddhist temples, positioned opposite each other not far from the glitzy hotel strip which is the home of the 'G'. The first temple was the Wat Chaiyamangalaram temple, a Thai buddhist temple. which is the home of one of the largest reclining Buddhas around, built in 1958

Across the road is a Burmese Buddhist temple, featuring a less relaxed looking Buddha

along with vignettes illustrating his life
The Burmese temple also included over a dozen different Buddha statues, showing how the image of Buddha changes from country to country. That helped answer a question that had been bugging me for a while - why so many representations of Buddha? Buddha was traditionally an Indian prince & a warrior before he decided on his career change (an early mid-life crisis?), and each culture shows what was their ideal representation of a warrior of the time. An American Buddha statue built now would probably be wearing a Seal Team 6 uniform.

Incidentally the 'fat Buddha' image beloved of hippy cafes everywhere is a little different - that is a representation of a Chinese monk called 'Budai'. He was a major figure in Chinese folklore who was intergrated into the Chinese take on Buddhism, to the joy of lardy practitioners worldwide....

Malaysian countryside

One of the attractions on the North Coast of Penang is the Tropical Spice Farm, a beautiful little sanctuary away from the hussle & bustle of Georgetown. Unfortunately there's a lot of traffic noise, but there're also garden trails where you can see (& smell) the herbs that you cook with every day growing in glorious fecundity. After some very grown up wandering round it's a relief to find a swing suspended from a tree bough where you can drift off
The gardens aren't without their own hoodlums though. I turned a corner and found these guys waiting for me
I said hello and started to walk up the steps but they didn't back down, in fact they started coming towards me with what looked like evil monkey grins on their evil monkey faces

I could hear crashing in the tree canopy approacing from behind me, so word of a vulnerable tourist was obviously out on the (grape) vine. I was backing slowly away when either a leaf or an insect brushed my ear, so I jumped, spun round and ran away. Which was a little embaressing.

Fortunately the spice farm had a wonderful restaraunt overlooking the beach so I fortified myself with a Thai curry & some manly facial expressions.

After that I went to the butterly farm, which had as one of it's attractions a 'scorpion pit'

I chuckled to myself about this James Bond villain-ish attraction...well I laughed until I found out that their Malaysian scorpions glow under UV light

Now that's freaky.

Afterwards I relaxed at the beach

Looks idyllic but I wasn't going in the water. Gangs of monkeys roaming through the treetops, scorpions gleaming sinisterly in the darkness - I reckon there was a bunch of frikkin' sea bass waiting for me. With lasers.

Rainbows

After getting back from Malaysia I was in a bit of a post-holiday funk, so I thought a bike ride would sort me out. Instead I pulled something in my back. And things had gotton busy in the office so I was having to work late as well. Stressed from work, leaving in the dark and not able to exercise to help burn it out, a classic 1-2 for the blues.

Anyway - looked out the other morning and saw this, when reminded me of the old hippy cliche that you can't have a rainbow without the rain
Although you could also say that you can't have a rainforest without the rain, and we all know how that ended up

Anyway - next post I'll put up a few more photos from Malaysia, then we should be back to the usual diet of bikes & beer.

The future?

Just been for my last Penang dinner. I went to the local tourist-orientated hawkers market because my feet were tired. Unfortunately an international beer company (let's call them C***sberg) were finishing off a promotion, so the place was filled with beer-fuelled swaggering youths with large bottles of beer in their hands. There was pole dancing, there was dancing on chairs & tables with the inevitable collapses, there was aggression & the need for bouncers. I've been there before and it's always been a very mellow vibe so in my opinion the blame lies very squarely with the way that the beer was promoted.

I guess Penang has a decision - does it want to be the Ibiza of Malaysia? I've had a great time here, so I hope it can ignore the pull of the beer companies and stay true to itself.

Incidentally the sting ray wings were excellent as always.

Lost in the jungle...

I had a very surreal day yesterday. Decided to go walking in the National Park at Teluk Bahang, and followed a very steep but fairly easy track to one of the beaches


– it's a turtle hatching beach & they had baby turtles in a tank, which were very cute

There was another track to a beach further along the coast, but I'd been warned that the signage wasn't as good and virtually no-one used it. But how hard can it be?

The track was ridiculous – slogging up a very steep hill on what looked like a faint drainage track, following faint red dots on trees about 20' apart and trying not to grab any of the many spikey trees that lined the trail. The descent on the other side was even worse, had to be very careful not to follow a false trail as I picked my way over boulders & through wait-a-whiles.
(the trail runs mid-picture left)

Got to the beach fine and it was nice - not much different to the previous beach, but nice
After a bit of a rest I headed back. The climb was even harder the other way, my legs were getting really tired and I was getting low on water. On the descent I somehow strayed off the trail. What I should have done is go back up to find the trail, but my legs were tired so I kept going down towards the sound of surf. I ended up in dense undergrowth surrounded by vine-covered boulders with no idea where the trail was. I tried traversing across the hill by scrambling over the boulders but got spooked when a leaf litter 'bridge' collapsed underneath me and almost dumped me into a hole. Panicked quite badly and got very quivery wondering if I was going to make it out, even tried calling for help but the surf was drowning me out.

I sat down and let the heart rate drop and took stock of what I had – 1/3 litre of water, half a pack of biscuits, about 6 e-load tablets, mobile phone with no signal, Ipod. Had a think about what to do and decided to go back up to the ridge where the bush wasn't as thick and there was more chance of finding the trail. It was a bitch of a climb and I was stopping after every 5 or 6 steps to rest and untangle myself from various pointy vines & leaves. Sometimes I'd see what looked like an easy descent but I was also channeling Bear Ghrylls – 'make a plan and stick with it'.

Finally got to the ridge and found the trail, followed it down very carefully this time. Emerged on the beach relieved but exhausted, still another 3km of steep up & down to go and no water. So if the local streams have anything nasty in them, so do I. The walk back was a slog, temperatures of 30 degrees + and probably 95% humidity. Finally made it back to the bus stop completely exhausted with a banging headache, nausea and faint shakes (which I still had 6 hrs later) – normally a sign of heatstroke for me.

The bus aircon was good so I dozed off on the way back to town, then gingerly walked to the hotel. Cleaned up and rested for a bit, then decided that the nausea might be because all I'd eaten all day had been a Nasi Lemak and a pack of biscuits. So I headed up to the rotating restaurant in the hotel – somewhere I've been meaning to visit all week.


At first the motion didn't helping, especially as it juddered a bit, and I was wondering how I could quietly throw up. But as I tucked into the set menu of prawn cocktail, sesame seed salad, onion soup, crumbed snapper and green tea ice cream and watched the sun go down over Georgetown I relaxed a bit.
Until the singing started – they had a house band crooning easy pop ballads in the best bad kareoke style. Because video of their performance was piped into TVs around the room you could clearly see that the girls must have been chosen for their ability to squeeze into shorty shorts & white plastic boots more than their voices.
After the tiramasu we'd gone full circle
and I could watch the world go round over coffee


I got the bill and found that I'd got an early-bird discount so it only cost 58 Ringitt. And I'd got a 50 Ringitt voucher for booking on line, so total cost was about $3.

The day before I saw glow in the dark scorpions and almost got mugged by a pack of monkeys. That all seemed so normal.

Traffic revisited

Think I may have been a little bit ranty the other day. Prolonged exposure to stop-go traffic will do that to me! But, sitting in another jam, one thing that strikes me is how unaggressive the drivers are to each other. The horn is occasionally used but more in amused exasperation than aggression. Less 'cut me up and I will punch you' and more 'did you really think that 10' car would fit in that 4' gap?'. And surprisingly few accidents too, presumably because the level of craziness is expected by all. It reminds me of one of those 'ultimate fighting' bouts, where after 20 mins of trying to gouge each others eyes out or snap each others spines the bell goes and the two combatants slap each other on the back and walk away smiling.

I was also whining about the crush of crowds but generally the people are really friendly. Not just those working the tourist trail but the young lads at the station in KL who saw me trying to get my card to swipe and stopped to help, the three separate people who told me i'd dropped 20 sens or the old Chinese bloke on the bus who saw me use my tourist card and pulled out his travel card to show me, pointed, smiled, nodded and then fell asleep.

Temples

Today I decided to visit Kek Lok Si temple, the biggest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. Unfortunately the rest of Penang seemed to have the same idea which lead to a very chaotic bus journey - or maybe they're all like that?

The base of the temple is ringed by hawkers markets & traders, so you have to fight you way up narrow steps flanked by stalls selling t-shirts, bags & nik-naks.
The sun beats through the flimsy fabric cover and you're frequently balked by people randomly stopping to admire the latest Man Utd bootleg shirts. If you pause to allow this you're immediately swamped by people from behind - instead you should shift to stand in the way of people coming down and stare & edge your way through in whatever way possible.

Once you get to the top you see a turtle pond, which makes you realise that you weren't that hemmed in after all

This actually doesn't give the right impression as to how many turtles were in there - it was ridiculous. Although the big daddy of the turtle world had been isolated to a separate pond, where he was the target for good luck coins
That's a regular slice of bread floating next to him if you need some scale.

The temple itself was beautiful, and would have been very peaceful if you ignored the hoards of site-seers & tourists

and it's position on the hill meant that there were some cool breezes despite the heat
The main body of the temple was some sumptuously decorated halls containing a variety of statues of Buddha in his various guises





I'm not up with Buddhist dogma but I think I understand the basics - spoilt Indian prince leaves his home for a journey of abstinence & poverty, which eventually leads to enlightenment and teachings that you need to move beyond your immediate circumstances & lose attachment to your earthly possessions to be truly happy. Very revolutionary at the time, probably even more so now and you could argue leading to a passivity where to be involved is to be attached. What I'm not so sure about is how this leads to lavishly decorated temples, huge gold plated statues and a variety of different 'looks' in the same temple. I can understand different sects interpreting in different ways - as ever man gets in the way of god, and even the saintly Tibetan Buddhists have been involved in pogroms against rival groups - but it seems odd to me to see them in the same complex. I picked up a free guide to Buddhism which may help, and I have a few friends who are no doubt shaking their heads at my crassness and will fill me in on what I'm missing.

Anyway, there was one more statue to see so we squeezed into an 'inclined lift' for a trip up the hill
The main statue used to stand exposed to the rain - and still does in any postcards or pictures that you see - but has been given a gazebo to shelter under, a godly 'manbrella' to keep the sun off
To be honest I have no idea if this is a representation of the Buddha or not, but it's very impressive all the same.

In typical Penang style, there was also a Hindu temple at the base of the hill....