It was time to head for Malaysia, so with a heavy heart we left Koh Lanta on a minibus for Trang, hoping to make it as far as Penang in one day. At Trang we got another bus and sat down. A fellow Englishman and I started chatting about the price of Pad Thai, and before I knew it we realised that we had spent most of our secondary school sitting next to each other as well. So here are a few pictures of Richard and I celebrating this unlikely meeting in Georgetown, Penang Island.
Malaysia does it's very best to make us feel at home, with 3 pin plugs, monuments to a portly Queen Vic, great Indian and Cantonese food, red post boxes and at least every second person speaking great English - they even named the town after a famous English lunatic. I was getting used to agreeing prices in Thai and learning new food expressions - I even had a stab at their alphabet. No such problem here - we are having to abandon our simplified, present tense, patronising English. My father obviously subjugated the locals well during his occupation in the 50s. They even wire things up like him, which is much safer than the Thais do, but with an excess of switches.
So after a hang over curing breakfast we took a walk round town. Town has more temples/mosques/churches per square mile than anywhere else, so we popped into the chinese temple. The blue house pictured belonged to a local chinese tycoon, Chong Fat Tze.
Malaysia does it's very best to make us feel at home, with 3 pin plugs, monuments to a portly Queen Vic, great Indian and Cantonese food, red post boxes and at least every second person speaking great English - they even named the town after a famous English lunatic. I was getting used to agreeing prices in Thai and learning new food expressions - I even had a stab at their alphabet. No such problem here - we are having to abandon our simplified, present tense, patronising English. My father obviously subjugated the locals well during his occupation in the 50s. They even wire things up like him, which is much safer than the Thais do, but with an excess of switches.
So after a hang over curing breakfast we took a walk round town. Town has more temples/mosques/churches per square mile than anywhere else, so we popped into the chinese temple. The blue house pictured belonged to a local chinese tycoon, Chong Fat Tze.
Towards midday, my body temperature and the outside warmth started to bid in a very dehydrating auction. I realised that here the sun has no qualms about boiling your head from above here and cowered in a covered market which Lou looked round while I tried to work out ways to cool down. We decided to go up Penang Hill - not very difficult as public transport here works superbly and there is a funicular railway to the top. I spent much of the journey persuading Lou that the train would not probably career down the 45 degree slope in the event of a failure, and it was well worth the views from the top. Just along from here is the enormous labyrinth Chinese Buddhist temple of Kok Lok Si. Here one can shop in a huge marketplace for replica football shirts and worship the buddha simultaneously. Far more noisy than the Thai brand of buddism!
1 comment:
Hey Chris,
Long time no write and all that is my fault. Some great reading on here, Keep up the good work!
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