We spent most of the day sitting in another full minivan en route to Penang, Malaysia. We arrived in the evening and found a decent hotel in Chinatown, then set out for an Indian feast. It took quite some time to find an ATM to withdraw some Malaysian ringgit…

Penang is a fairly large island off the coast, not far from the Thai border. Georgetown (where we stayed) is the largest town there and there are several other towns and villages scattered about the island. Sarah and I spent the next day exploring the place on our own; I went up to Kek Lok Si temple and Penang Hill.

I went up to the temple first, which had nice views but was partly still under construction and so not too exciting. I left the temple grounds and started to walk towards the railway going up Penang Hill, but got lost and wandered deep into a residential area. On my way, I walked past a small trash dump and was stopped by a guy: “Hello! Where you going?”. I told him I was going to Penang Hill so he immediately offered to take me there. Everything seemed cool until he started huffing a bag of paint he had been carrying around… He told me his name and some random stuff in broken english but it was so badly slurred I couldn’t understand a word. I was starting to get nervous - then he led me down a narrow, dark shortcut through a patch of trees. He could tell I was starting to act a bit tense and assured me that he “no robbery you, i no robbery!” It ended up perfectly fine - he took me right to the ticket counter. We each bought a ticket (I was really hoping he would leave me at this point) and boarded the train. The ride up was quite depressing. He continued to huff various things from his pockets, horrifying the orthodox Islamic family sitting around him. Every couple minutes he would point at something and ask me if I was going to take a photo of it - I did my best to ignore him. By the end of the 20 minute train ride the car reeked of shoe polish and I was dying to get away from this guy. Luckily I started talking with some other travelers and he wandered off…

Penang Hill is full of monkeys who aren’t shy about approaching humans so I was able to take a lot of photos of them. After hanging out for a while, I took the train back down and caught a bus back to Georgetown to meet Sarah for dinner.

In the morning, Sarah and I checked out of our hotel (Olive Spring on Lebuh Chulia) and walked to the bus station to get a ride to Taiping. Lonely Planet made it sound nice enough and the friendly lady at the hotel said it was “nice”, so we decided to make a stop there on our way south. The bus ride was only a couple hours so we arrived in the early afternoon at the bus station just outside of town. We got ourselves a taxi and started for Taiping, but the car ran out of gas after about 500 meters just as the driver was pulling into the gas station! We waited for a few minutes while he refueled it and tried to start it again unsuccessfully before he went about hailing us another cab…

The next challenge was finding a hotel room. The first place we tried wanted RM55 for a double room and wasn’t willing to bargain. I walked around, checking hotel after hotel to find every one either utterly disgusting or fully booked. I finally went to the tourist info center and called around to nearly every hotel in town and came up with one place left to check: the Nanyang Hotel who wasn’t answering their phone. I went over there to check out the room and they had a double with A/C and a bathroom for RM35… not so bad looking at first glance… so we checked in. Upon further inspection, we learned that the sheets hadn’t been changed in at least 3 years (there was graffiti on mine dated 2003)…

Walking around town didn’t provide much excitement, either. It was starting to look all bad when we found a great restaurant - an all vegetarian japanese restaurant with excellent food. We ate too much and then went back to the hotel, shot some weird photos in the dingy room and then went to sleep (on our own blankets!). We agreed to leave for the Cameron Highlands the next morning…

We are now in the Cameron Highlands, staying in the town of Tanah Rata. The Cameron Highlands is Malaysia’s largest hill station - a string of towns surrounded by tea plantations and small farms. We showed up in Tanah Rata with nothing booked, as usual, and found all of the hotels to be full! We were eventually pointed to the Twin Pines hotel who were also fully booked, but had a RM50 room in the retirement home just up the road. We offered RM40 and he agreed so we went to see the place. Turns out this is one of the nicest rooms I’ve stayed in yet! Its clean, has a private bathroom with a hot water shower (!) and there’s even free laundry facilities.

The highlands are a nice change from the coastal towns. The temperature is much cooler and the town is surrounded by beautiful greenery. There are a lot of other travelers here as well and a good range of accomodation and touristy stuff to do.

Today we hired a guide to take us to one of the plantations and on a couple short jungle walks. First we visited the Boh Teh plantation and enjoyed a great cup of tea in their tea room overlooking the fields, then took a walk up to a viewpoint with a couple jungle detours on the way to spot some pitcher plants…

The plan is to stay here for a couple days and then continue south towards Kuala Lumpur…

After the Cameron Highlands, we continued south to Kuala Lumpur.

From the bus we walked into chinatown and found a decent cheap room at Wheelers. Over the next few days we set off exploring the city and surrounds by day and hanging out in chinatown by night. I visited the monkeys at Batu caves, a couple museums and the KL tower - the standard tourist routine, really.

The hotel had a nice bar on the rooftop, so I hung out there a few times and met some nice people. One of them, Ben, performed at the bar some nights with his cousin. He had a spare guitar, so on the last two nights there I played with them at the bar and had lots of fun…