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....

Out & about

Yesterday it was time to get out of Georgetown and check out some of the local area. First of all I took the bus out to Batu Ferenghi,a beachside town about 16km from Georgetown. I was thinking about staying here so was curious to see if I'd made the right decision and yes, I had. The town was a strip of shops, cafes, massage spas and tailors and the beach was pretty small, very grainy and the water was very murky (possibly due to the large number of jet-skis for hire). To be fair I was there in the middle of the day so a lot of things were shut, and I was also there for a tropical downpour
There's a night market there every night so I'll revisit before making any hard judgements.

After that I continued along the road to Teluk Bahang, a fishing village and national park. This was more like the Malaysia I'd heard about

There's apparently some good hiking in the national park, so that's down for one day of my agenda before I leave.

Traffic

No pictures for this one because I'm on a bus stuck in traffic and writing this on my iPod. Some of the busses here have wi-fi, some don't, and even if this one did I couldn't post pics due to stupid Apple lack of connectivity.

The bus system in Penang looks pretty organised at first glance. But when you come to use it reality strikes. The bus on the main tourist route is timetabled as 'every 7 minutes' - all well & good. But all bar that one route are timetabled as 'every 30 mins' or 'every 45 mins' and there's no indication of when that starts. So you sit & wait, knowing that as soon as you nip off to get a bite to eat one will arrive. That's if it's not full (in which case you get a cheery toot and wave as it sails past) or switching drivers (which generally leads to a pantomime of confusion, the end result usually being that you wait on one stationary bus as another one passes. At least they have aircon.)

Once you're on the bus the real fun starts. The traffic is bad here. Excruciatingly, teeth-curlingly, hair-grindingly bad. There's about a third more cars on the road than it can handle. I have no idea where all these people came from or where they are hoping to go, but I hope they're not in a hurry. Because everything is crawling at walking pace, people will pull out from sidestreets and create new lanes where there should be none simply through force of will. Merging looks to be simply a game of chicken. If one lane speeds up everyone in the other lane frantically switches over, creating space in their lane which in turn speeds up and leads to everyone desperately jumping back. And all the time a steady stream of mopeds hurtle past on both sides, weaving between all lanes and often on the pavement too. Alley cat racers on fixies looking to prove their manhood should sell their 'whips' and venture out here on a 20 year old 125cc step-through to prove their worth. Bonus points if you can do it with 2 kids on the saddle or a large propane cylinder strapped to the back.

You start off flinching at the near misses. Then you start to get agitated at the stop-go traffic, but you breath deeply and understand that it's just the way here and you have to go with the flows. Eventually you want to stand up and shout 'enough! Let me out! I'll walk from here!' You don't know where you are or where you're going, but it still has to be quicker. You want to punch the driver in the face, jump off the bus and throw rocks at the traffic. You want to clothesline passing moped riders. But you know that if you do that self-same driver will be coming back the other way, and although you've got lost and have been waiting for 90 minutes in 34 degrees of heat and almost 100% humidity, he will barely slow his empty air-conditioned bus as he cheerfully toots & waves.

Two addendums -
This was written on an IPod in the between two of the 'every seven minute' busses. And those of you that have seen me type on even a normal keyboard will know how slow I am, never mind one of these wee tippie-tappie things cursed with apple UI & predictive text.

Also - I decided to get a one week bus pass, which covers all busses on the island for 7days for around $10. I had to show my passport to get this, and the clerk painstakingly wrote my details and the cards expiry date on the card in marker pen. Which 2 days later has rubbed off. Couldn't think of a better metaphor.