Stop 3; George Town, Penang

So, it seems we were due a reality check after the high fives of the first bus trip.  The journey on from Tanah Rata to George town (estimated 4-5 hours) was not as luxury as the first trip, in fact it included a crippled machine with barely the remnants of a gear box and two bus changes thereafter.  This all resulted in a 7 hour journey, a lot of confusion and Bex losing her camera....

Wrapping the story up early in the tale; we had to stay 4 nights instead of 3 (no hardship at all) and the owner of our hostel (a multi-discipline commonwealth and Olympic athlete for Malaysia, obviously!?!) helped out with loads of phone calls in Malay and eventually drove us the equivalent of a round trip to the airport to recover the camera from the bus terminal.  The man was a total hero, a certain hostel now has two completely overblown reviews.

Anyway, back to George Town, its lovely.  Big cities like KL don't really stoke my boiler, this place was great.  Huge sections are protected by UNESCO world heritage and you can walk streets hardly changed since colonial times.  All the grand buildings in use today are all old colonial buildings too, even the police station (wish I'd remembered to go back and photograph this).

Of course this in the modern day and it has much more going on than that.  The food is rumoured to be the best in Malaysia and I think I'd agree!  There is also a whole swathe street art recently painted on decrepit building ends and odd walls.  Much to my surprise it was actually really entertaining to hunt down and interact with for a whole morning!

Penang isn't too large an island and its not all about George Town, so we grabbed unlimited bus passes and headed out to explore.

Penang Hill sits in the middle of the island.  Great views promised and a meagre 800m above see level, we thought we'd take a gander at that early in our visit... I've posted a more helpful review on TripAdvisor for this one, it was brutal.  To start with [we have since learnt and re-learnt] if something sticks out like a sore thumb then it basically starts from sea level.  Secondly, hills and mountains are a LOT steeper out here!!  We managed to summit both Penang Hill and second unnamed peak (got a bit lost on the way) in under 3 hours but were both broken quite badly...for days.  Thankfully there was a funicular railway down from the odd theme park style summit (there was an owl museum?!?!) which we took back with all the sightseers.  We were probably the only people that day to use the ticket office at the top to get a one way ticket down...

Next day we took the shortest and flattest trail we could (the legs were really not in a good way) at a preplanned visit to Penang's tiny national park.  Short story; our first experience of lovely beaches (though stinger infested) of our trip, and some incredibly lucky wildlife experiences.  First up a 2m monitor lizard leaving its sun warming to swim off into hiding in the sea (so incredible to me I didn't manage to capture even a rubbish photo).  Second a troop of dusky leaf monkeys which we watched for about 5mins [we not encountered anyone, even in latter travels in Borneo, who has seen them], incredible!

Our final act was a 5am taxi to the airport as we jetted off to Malaysian Borneo, very happy that we didn't skip most of the peninsular as so many do...