Bang! Penang

I didn't expect to have much time or daylight in which to explore Penang on my first night. However, due to peninsular Malaysia's weird time zoning, I actually had about three hours in which to explore the colonial district, Georgetown, which includes quite the collection of sights. Little India, Armenian Street, several mosques, Chinese temples, and the general peeling old walls that I love. Even though most sights were closed, I was able to see most of the destinations in this part of town, and wandering around led me to some great unexpected finds. I stopped to buy some snacks from an Indian street food seller, and when I only had a large bill the customer before me (who also only had large bills, apparently) decided to pay for my food as well as his. It was less than a dollar, but still a generous gesture that I appreciated, and that made me feel welcome. I was looking for a cafe to sit at and cool down - perhaps a holdover of my Vietnam habits - and only found one, very European, very overpriced place. The iced milk tea I bought tasted like mildly flavored dishwater, and cost as much as the dinner I would later buy. Lesson learned.

Part of Mahamariamman Temple, oldest Hindu temple
in Georgetown

Kapitan Keling Mosque

Storefront in Little India

Khoo Kongsi temple (maybe)

roof detail -- so intricate!

Penang is renowned for its food, but in all my wanderings I didn't come across many places that looked open, let alone enticing. As I walked back to the hostel shortly after sunset, though, a nearby street sparkled with the bright lights of a convergence of food carts. Paradise! I got fresh pineapple juice, which was perfection in a plastic bag, and a local dish called Hokkien char. The food was ok. I think I would have appreciated it more if I hadn't already had two samosas a few hours earlier. The samosas, by the way, tasted more like pizza than that crazy 'naan pizza' I ordered the night before. While I ate, I kept one eye on my baggie of juice to make sure it didn't tip over and spill precious cargo all over the table, and another eye on the juice lady, who moved like a machine, chopping and cramming and ladling and pouring into her juicer to keep up with the steady flow of customers.

This captures the lights and some of the crowds, but none of the frenetic pace

On Saturday, I had grand plans to wake up early and see a lot, but I ended up sleeping in and editing the day's itinerary. I took the bus to Kek Lok Si, a famous Buddhist temple. When I got off the bus I wandered a bit in the wrong direction, following some people who I thought were going to the temple until I realized I might just be following them home. Then I asked for directions and got going the right way. The temple was impressive, large, complex, and a bit mazelike. The base was populated by vendors, but once past that gauntlet it was only fellow tourists that I had to weave through. I spent about two hours there, exploring crannies and heights and taking pictures.

The whole complex. For a sense of scale, the statue you can barely see in the
structure at the center of the photo is about 100ft tall.

The base of the tower

View of the complex and surrounding areas from the top of the tower

30.2m statue of Kuan Yim, goddess of mercy

When I got back to the bottom of the hill, it was time for lunch. I had seen many food vendors earlier in the day, and now I got to take my pick. I saw a place selling chicken rice, a simple-sounding but highly recommended local dish, and decided to give it a try. It was pretty much exactly what it sounds like, but it was nonetheless delicious. It had a home-cooked flavor, with the taste of the tender chicken woven into rice that was probably cooked in stock. A liberal dousing of some sort of chili sauce gave it a kick that took the dish to the next level. Satisfaction.

I took the bus back to one of the main stations, intending to go to the botanical garden next. However, when I got there there was no sign of the one bus that would take me there, and I didn't feel like waiting. Traveling alone, I have the luxury of autonomy, so I made a spur of the moment decision. I went to the Penang Museum instead. It was pretty highly recommended and it was interesting, but it wasn't as good as the hype. It explained the history of Penang, especially focusing on the many peoples who did and do call it home. I think I just wasn't in the right mood to read and look at things behind glass, so I didn't stay for long. From there I went to the Temple of Mercy and then the Clan Houses on the jetty. Clan houses were sort of miniature towns built on stilts over the water, where families from the same clan/town in China lived together and supported one another. I expected a sort of relic, and so I was surprised to find that people still live there.

Mega-incense at the Temple of Mercy

Between two houses on the jetty

By the time I left I was ready for a snack. I walked past a woman cooking and, a few steps past her, I was hit by the aroma of her food. I immediately turned around and went back to her to eat whatever it was that she was making. I later found out that it was pasembur, a variable dish that includes almost anything, as long as that anything also includes a spicy peanut sauce and sliced cucumbers. Mine came with these very Vietnamese-like fried cups with sprouts and shrimp, and an egg and tofu. Surprisingly, the tofu was a very good vehicle for enjoying the sauce.

Pasembur

On the walk back to the hostel I saw that the Teochew Temple, which had attracted me on the previous evening's walk, was open. It underwent extensive restoration a few years ago, but for the most part it seemed like an overlooked jewel. It was actually one of my favorite sites of the whole trip.

Temple guardians painted on the doors

Roof detail

When I got back to the hostel a group was going out for Indian tea, and I joined them. I had my first cup of masala tea, and it tasted like a particularly spicy pumpkin pie. I went back to the hotel to rest for a while and wait for the street food to emerge with the darkness. When the time came I got a starfruit juice and dry wan tan mee, a dish with noodles, brown sauce, wontons, pork, and greens. I gobbled it before I remembered to take a picture. I washed all of that down with more juice, passion fruit this time.

On Sunday I once again succumbed to sleeping in, though not as late. I was feeling guilty because I thought I was the last person in the hostel to get up, but when I went back to my room one last time before leaving I realized that everyone else was still in there and fast asleep (the beds have curtains around them, so it was hard to tell). I decided to go to the market that I had skipped on the previous morning. I found a bustling cluster of food stands and picked out my breakfast, char koai teow, which is essentially pad thai. Believe it or not, I also ordered coffee.

Historic (everything is historic) Campbell Street. Very Chinese if you can't tell.

I hit the road, caught my bus and, unbeknownst to me, started the day's big adventure. It should have been straightforward. Bus 101 takes you to the Tropical Spice Garden. First of all, it was a really long ride. Then, the bus driver may or may not have known where the garden was. He dropped me off at some point along the road and told me to just walk from there. But I didn't know where I was supposed to go, exactly, either. So I walked. I asked a few people along the way and some didn't know but others knew and told me to keep walking. The sidewalk ended as the road took a steep winding incline around a mountain. I debated keeping going. This didn't seem totally safe. As I contemplated what to do, something landed in a tree and I thought it was a huge bird until I realized it was a black monkey. I decided I had come this far (it had been almost an hour by bus) and I might as well keep going, so I walked up the mountain on the shoulder. I walked and walked and then it occurred to me that I might have the garden's contact info on my map. I did. I called and she said that it was about five minutes past the hotel near where I got dropped off. Five minutes on foot or by bus? By bus. Oh. I kept walking. I was second-guessing things the whole way up. I was passed by a troupe of cyclists going down the mountain. Then I saw a man, also in cycling gear, driving a truck. I asked him if he knew where it was. Since he was coming downhill, he should have seen it and would be able to confirm whether I was going the right way. But he didn't know where it was. At this point there was a cemetery on the other side of the street, so I called the garden to ask again, now that I had a landmark. She said I was going the right way, and that it should be nearby. Parents, now is the time for you to avert your eyes. The man driving the truck offered to give me a ride up to the garden, and I accepted. He had people to rendezvous with, and I decided it would be safe. He took me up the mountain in about one minute that would have taken me maybe ten more to walk. He had a big bag of durian next to him, and on one of the bends they rolled towards me. I put my hand out to stop them, forgetting that they are nature's medieval maces, and got punctured like a pincushion. So, just starting my day, I saw a monkey, hitch-hiked, and got stabbed by a durian. Quite the start.

I had expected a small, tidy, labeled garden of herbs and things. It turns out that the word 'tropical' didn't just indicate the growing region of the spices, but also the style of the garden. It was more of a jungle. It was also kind of expensive and pretty small. Once I got over the disconnect between reality and my expectations, I actually really enjoyed it. I took my time, stood still, and let four- and six-legged creatures appear around me. There weren't too many other people around to scare them away or to see me squatting or stretching to get good photos. I'll be making a separate post for all of the critters I snapped while at the garden.

Not quite sure why this was on the spice globe

Ferns

Buddha's Belly Bamboo

There were several other sights I wanted to see on the way to the garden, and I was glad that I had decided to get the garden taken care of first, and then make my way to the others as I headed back into town. I stopped at the floating mosque, a relatively small but picturesque mosque built out over the water. I wasn't sure whether I could go in since I wasn't appropriately dressed and they didn't offer robes to visitors like they did at other mosques, so I just sat outside and enjoyed the view and the sound of the ocean for a while. Next, I went to a Burmese Buddhist temple built in 1803 and then to Wat Chaimangalaram, with a massive reclining Buddha.

Floating Mosque

At the Burmese temple

Reclining Buddha

You may notice that I haven't mentioned anything about food since my market breakfast, and by this time it was almost five and I was ravenous. I ended up eating at a place in Little India just blocks from my hostel. The owner told me that the special was chicken masala dosai, and I consented to eat it without any argument. I received a banana leaf as a plate, and the chicken masala was wrapped in a massive crepe-like thing (the dosai). The owner was incredibly accomodating to my total lack of know-how, and brought me small plates where he doled out the different sauces I might want to try with the dish (most people just ladle the sauce right onto the food) and he also brought me a spoon and fork. I started out with a fork, unsure of how to tackle the meal with my hands, but I quickly realized that trying to eat this with a fork felt as silly as eating pho with a fork, and that there is a reason people eat these foods with the implements that they do, so I cast the fork aside and dug in. I don't know if it was just my extreme hunger, but it was delicious. I told the owner, who came by every now and then to check up on me, that it was the best Indian food I had ever had. When I got back to the hostel I found out that people were going out for street food for dinner later, and I decided to join them. I had curry mee (a curry soup) and fruit juice made from the ambra fruit, which I had never heard of before.

Curry mee: soup with tentacles and shellfish and a fish ball

Ambra juice and fruit, a local specialty

The next morning was my last day. I went to the market again for breakfast, and had char hor fun, which was fine but not particularly fun. It was a noodle dish with a thick, clear sauce and bits of meat and greens. I only had a few hours in town, so I went to the restored home of entrepreneur Cheong Fatt Tze, also known as the Blue Mansion. It was really hard to get a good picture of the whole thing from the outside, and no pictures were allowed on the inside, but it was quite beautiful and made me want to paint my future home the same color. I took a detailed tour and learned about his rags to riches story, as well as his many wives (he married the seventh one when he was 70 and she was 17).

With that, it was time to say goodbye to Penang. I had a thorough but relaxing time. I felt like a saw a lot, most of what I wanted to see, but also like I could have happily spent two weeks just there. Next stop: Malacca.

Clever phonebooth graffiti on Love Lane

Because I took so many pictures, I'll be making a few supplementary photo posts from my time in Penang.