Malaysia 2006: Day 6
Up at a ridiculously early hour to go to the airport and catch a flight on Air Asia to Penang.
Air Asia = very nice airplanes with cheap fares.
Trip to Penang = more convoluted than we expected.
Snorkeling/scuba diving in Malaysia: incredible pain in the butt. =(
If you go to Penang from Kuala Lumpur, take one of the Bus Konsortium buses. It's not that much longer than travelling by air, it's much cheaper, and it's more comfortable. This isn't to knock Air Asia, but we ended up torpedoing our plans to fly back to Kuala Lumpur from Langkawi the next day because of ridiculous ferry schedules and very rigid scuba/snorkel boat schedules that made our original plan of heading to Langkawi via ferry completely incompatible with scuba/snorkelling. =(
First stop was Snake Temple, after a breakfast of asam lemak (sp?) at the airport. Supposedly home to poisonous snakes, it reeked of tourist trap with a handful of snakes that looked like they'd been drugged. To see a few more snakes was an additional admission fee into a separate "snake display" at the temple. No thanks. Taxi rides on Penang were also absurdly expensive, so we took a taxi to Komtar Tower in downtown Georgetown to continue exploring.
At Komtar, we discovered the true difficulties in scuba/snorkeling and ferry schedules-- seems that unless you already know the websites to go to, finding them via a random google for "malaysia snorkeling" is almost futile-- and abandonded our plans to go to Langkawi the next day. We ended up wasting the morning on this; by the time we figured everything out it was early afternoon, so we caught another taxi to the Botanical Gardens, which were actually quite nice. Lots of the smaller exhbits were closed, but the main garden itself was open, and not too bad to walk around in if you had an umbrella and lots of sunblock. Monkeys were also all over the grounds, providing additional entertainment.
Penang Hill was another taxi ride away, then a train ride up the hill to some very nice views and a suprisingly large community atop the hill. Several temples, a little hotel, a jungle canopy walkway (that was also closed. *sigh*) and for hikers, a few trails back down the hill, one to the botanical gardens, if you have 3-4 hours to spare in the heat. Being a few degrees cooler since we were 830 meters high was also appreciated!
As sunset approached, we grew bored and headed back to downtown Georgedown. The plan was to go to Little India in downtown Georgetown and go eat, but our (even more overpriced) taxi driver told us it was past 8:00pm and they were closed, a fact that was reinforced by the front desk at the Oriental Hotel. Instead, we went next door to a 24 hour Indian restaurant and stuffed ourselves. A few blocks north were some more food vendors (papaya and mango slices, mmmm), some more hotels, a few trendy bars evidenced by neon signage, and the Eastern & Oriental Hotel, which had a beautiful lobby and occupied a nice bit of oceanfront that we took a few pictures at.