"Welcome to Paradise" (Green Day)

After a very easy border crossing again (got to love south-east Asia), we were in Malaysia. Our first stop was Penang (or Georgetown), a town on the island of Pulau Penang. Entering the city across a very impressive bridge, the bright lights and big city look of the place was a bit of a surprise after having been at the beach for a while! Penang is a very clean city, the first of what I assume will be several clean cities. We found the hotel and arrived just about the same time as all the others who had come down from Surat Thani while we (Edel, Mike, Shinnick, Maura and Jo) had come directly from Phuket. So we headed out en mass for dinner, eventually splitting into two groups – those who wanted western food, and those who wanted local food. The local food group headed to a night market where almost every Asian cuisine was represented in some way. As a slight treat, a couple of us even had oysters! All the food was accompanied by some slightly strange Chinese music and couples dancing in the midst of the plastic tables and food smells! The view from our hotel in Penang:

The next day I headed off on a walking tour of the main sights of Penang. Ann was my hapless victim as I found her along the way and dragged her with me. Our first observation was that Penang doesn’t open until about 11am. Coffee shops and restaurants were firmly closed and shuttered, leaving us the rather unappealing option of eating breakfast at a food stall in the foyer of an office block – a food experience best forgotten, particularly the unintentionally fizzy mango juice.

Then it was time to wander the streets, and our second observation was that Penang was very hot and humid. Within minutes we were drenched and wondering when we could return to the hotel and the air-conditioning! But we soldiered on and made our third observation – that the walking tour of Penang does not take much time at all! We saw the outside of a Catholic Church (the front doors were locked and did not even appear to have a key hole or handle, but the noticeboard assured us that services were held there!), the outside of the museum, the outside of the art gallery, and then, finally, both the inside and the outside of the Cornwallis Fort. The museum at the fort provided us with many interesting facts about the fort and about Penang itself, together with some history about the East India Company. The son of the founder of the fort was later the founder of Adelaide. We were warned to watch out for the wild horses at the fort, but none were forthcoming. The most dangerous animal we encountered was a wolf-whistling parrot.

The City Hall:

The chapel at Fort Cornwallis:

The cannon at Fort Cornwallis, with highrises off in the distance:

After the fort we continued to walk around and went to the HSBC Bank on Downing Street, which is right next to the Royal Bank of Scotland… so no evidence of colonial roots then… After a mission to the shopping centre to find a new watch for our fearless leader (including the scariest, most deserted shopping centre I have ever been in), we spent the afternoon enjoying a cheeky bottle of wine and a bit of a chat before heading back to the night market for dinner (but no oysters this time, they didn’t look fresh).

From Penang it was time to head back to the beach. Our journey took us first to the port of Kuala Besut, a journey that was supposed to take 9 hours took us only about 4, so we had the afternoon to wander the town. That took about 2 minutes (there was only one café open thanks to Ramadan, and it was otherwise a pretty standard fishing village), so it left the rest of the afternoon for catching up on reading, journals and sleep. The town finally came alive around dusk, and the restaurants were rammed immediately after the sunset. We enjoyed a lovely meal, and then headed back to the hotel for an early night.

The harbour at Kuala Besut:

The next morning we boarded speedboats for the journey to the Perhentian Islands, about a 30 minute ride from Kuala Besut. The trip across was fantastic fun, crashing across the waves powered by 400 bhp! We arrived at our destination and home for the next 4 nights, and it was exactly as we expected from the name – Paradise Beach. Clear green water, bright blue sky, clean white sand. And our accommodation was right on the beach.

Coming ashore at the Perhentian Islands:

After a bite to eat for lunch, Pete took Rich and myself to the dive shop and after a pretty easy sell by the dive shop manager, Rich and I both signed up to do our Open Water diving course (there were no jet skis, so what else were we going to do??). And so the next four days were spent in a blur of videos, reading the manual, doing knowledge tests, and of course, diving. Despite identifying a couple of issues which impacted upon our learning process (I am rubbish at just breathing in and out through my mouth underwater when I don’t have my nose blocked, and Rich is afraid of fish), we both passed and are now qualified Open Water Divers (to a max of 18 metres). The dives were great, heaps of amazing fish and coral to see, and plenty of inspiration to do more diving in Borneo and beyond.

But it wasn’t all hard work – in an afternoon off, we headed off to join some of the others who were snorkelling at the beach around the corner, and were lucky enough to see several turtles gracefully swimming through the water, or feeding (less gracefully, it must be said) on sea grasses. We also saw the fantastic sight of a huge school of fish feasting on coral – the sound of crunching was amazing. The islands were a tropical paradise, unspoilt unlike so many of the beaches and islands around south-east asia. The isolation (there are no cars or roads, everything comes in from the mainland, and is transported around and between the islands by boat) and relatively basic facilities (including no powerpoints in the rooms!), made us feel a million miles away from the real world.

The storm on the way back to the mainland:

The return journey was a bit less idyllic than our journey out as a massive storm threatened overhead, but in the end delivered only a few spots of rain and a howling wind, and then we were back on the mainland and heading to Kuala Lumpur by overnight train.

Elaine, Mike and Edel on the overnight train: