A Big Adventure

December 4th 2008, Malaysia, Georgetown, Penang

Our Nature Gap Year Gets To Georgetown, Penang

Could Look Nice

And so to Penang and George Town, I am really looking forward to our visit, the guide books make it sound such a wonderful place to visit.

The coach was a nice simple way of traveling and by 4:00pm we had driven through some lovely countryside and some very big limestone hills many of which sadly were being destroyed by quarrying. Upon arrival at Georgetown we headed for the Oriental Hotel as recommended by the Rough Guide as a moderate priced option. I guess we will be sticking to using the DK book if this is the quality of The Rough Guide hotel picks, the hotel seemed to come with a full contingent of Miserable staff all in shirts of various shades of dirty.

The room was basic (understatement) and made our place back in KL look like rare luxury. The air-conditioning had no controls and was set at bloody cold, the bed cover looked very uninviting and the TV was made back in the sixties and it seemed to have forgotten where to find any channels so was  just a big box in a corner. The single glazed steel windows were big and offered a grand view of Georgetown which was very sad as the locality was a dump.

I had read that Georgetown was full of old properties from the days of English rule, all I could see looked like little China and a load of barely standing dumps, nothing grand, just depressing.

We could only book the hotel for one night at a time according to the reception staff, I never did understand why, but frankly it was a stroke of luck as actually staying here for longer would be awful.  The Oriental Hotel is it’s name, do yourself a favour give it a miss, unless you really do have no other choice.

We walked through crowded streets and stalls to the big mall (Pranklin) that we could see from the hotel, knowing there would be air conditioning and to get out of the depressing streets, luckily the mall also offered us a travel agents and with it a fast way out of this place and into Thailand. Once again flights were however very expensive, so we explored the coach idea, it only takes around 24 hours,  Ho hum. Anyway it was a third of the price of the plane, so we choose the coach with the good news it will leave at 8:30 am the next day.

We then looked around the massive Mall and decided also to eat at one of the restaurants inside, The Little Oasis was its name and bloody awful was its fare. Basty could care less though as he was on a high after finding a chap to upgrade his PSP so that he could play ‘knock off’ games.

We went to the cinema to watch Transporter 3,  again a nice cinema and such good value, the film had some interesting (censorship) cutting but was fun with loads of fast action. Unlike in KL the audience were sadly well behaved.

We walked back to the room, tomorrow we leave Georgetown and I wont be sorry on first impressions.

To find the best of Penang I guess it might be best to start elsewhere on the Island – although I guess if you are dropped off in the wrong side of town in any city you would feel the same way – the only thing is I’m not sure if this WAS the wrong side of town!

Sofia hennered her hair to get some shine back, also putting off getting under the horrid blanket, luckily she travels with her own pillow case. With the TV literally channeless it was time for the MacBook to come to the rescue, so we watched two episodes of Boston Legal then to sleep. We set the alarms for 7:00am.

[mappress]