4/19 Butterfly Sanctuary

4/19/2013: The night before I had talked to Ali, the front desk guy at the guesthouse, who was telling me about all the things to do in Penang. One of the suggestions was the fruit farm, where you pay 15 MR and eat unlimited amounts of fruit, including obscure tropical ones like durian. I was intrigued, so that was my plan for the day. I'd told Katrin about it and she wanted to do it too, so she decided to extend her stay in Penang for another day to go see the fruit farm. We took a bus out towards the national park and first got off at the butterfly sanctuary. The plan was to go to the fruit farm after that.

Katrin is originally from Germany and was trained as a dental assistant. She decided after a few years that she wanted to become a dentist, so she's planning on going back to school, and traveling in the meantime. I think she was about 2 months into her trip by this point - having spent some time in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. She met a Mexican guy and traveled with him for 7 weeks, and when I talked to her she was thinking of going to Mexico to work for his family as a tour guide for their German customers (his family runs tours in Mexico and Central America). She said that her English had really improved during the trip, which is a funny concept - traveling to SE Asia can improve your English.

We didn't have very high expectations for the butterfly sanctuary, but it turned out to be pretty cool, albeit very touristy. It's just a big pavilion with lots of trees, bushes, and flowers, and thousands of butterflies flying around and (I assume) enjoying themselves. We pretty much just wandered around and admired butterflies, which is admittedly not one of the manlier things I've ever done. It was fun though. There were also some big fish, an iguana, and a little sand pit of millipedes, which reminded me of the snake pit in Indiana Jones. Katrin had a nice fancy camera,  and my camera's battery had died (and I forgot my charger), so I let her be the photographer. We spent a long time there, and then moved inside where there were displays of frogs, bugs, and some snakes. Then we entered an endless maze of gift shops, which were actually pretty entertaining. 

Gold cocoons

Millipedes!

Butterfly Charmer

Leaf frogs

  As we were leaving, we talked to a Malaysian man for a little bit, who told us that the fruit farm was much more expensive than we thought, and that nothing good was in season so it would be a disappointment. We decided to just eat some fruit from the fruit vendor outside the butterfly sanctuary. We hired a taxi (spelled "teksi" in Malaysia) with an Australian guy and his mom, then caught the bus back to Georgetown. The Malaysian guy had told us to go to the Snake Temple instead, but by the time we got back to the city it was too late. The snake temple is just a temple with a lot of snakes apparently. We were both starving, so we wandered into Little India (the district, not a restaurant) and got some tandoori at a restaurant. Little India is a pretty sizeable area of the city, and most of the shops are either selling gold jewelry, Indian silk fabric, or gold deities. It felt like we had left Malaysia and entered India.

We returned to the hostel in the evening and took it pretty easy that night.