4/20 Penang Hill and Return to Chiang Mai

4/20/2013: In the morning I woke up somewhat early, said goodbye to Katrin, and then headed to Komtar - a huge skyscraper in Georgetown, the base of which houses the bus terminal. I found a bus company that was open and purchased a bus ticket to Kuala Lumpur that departed Penang at 9:30pm that night. On my way back to the hostel I wandered through a nice Saturday morning market, where all sorts of fruits and veggies were being sold, as well as clothes, fabric, jewelry, random trinkets, and chicken heads (along with - but separate from - the rest of the chicken). I stopped at a small restaurant and had some roti, which is this great Indian flat bread, along with a nice light soupy curry for dipping.

Roti

I returned to the hostel and had some coffee with Benedicte, the French girl I'd been chatting with occasionally during my stay at the hostel. She asked if I was planning on going to Penang Hill, and I said yes and asked if she wanted to go along. She said yes, so we hopped on a bus and headed west to the base of the hill. On the bus we were approached by an older Malaysian man who asked where we were from and initially predicted France. I don't know if it was a lucky guess, but I was impressed (not that I'm from France, but Benedicte is). I told him I was from the US, which propelled him into a tirade about America. He apparently had tried to move there at some point and said Americans are a bunch of assholes that didn't treat him well, yet when Americans come to Malaysia they love the country. It turns out he has the same exact name as the guy responsible for the bombings in Bali and US Immigration gave him a hard time when he was entering the country. He didn't see the problem. Then he said he wanted to move to South Carolina because he thought there were a lot of black people there and that he could fit in because he has dark skin too. Apparently he wasn't treated well, and I told him he may have moved to the least tolerant state possible in regard to Muslims. I don't think he was listening though. He just said he understood why America has so many enemies and that was that. No point in arguing with someone like that, so I started up a different conversation with Benedicte.

We arrived at the last stop and bought our tickets for the cable car up to the top of Penang Hill. The cable car really shoots up the hill, and we climbed about 700 meters in only a few minutes. At the top, we had great views of Georgetown, the ocean, and the Malaysian mainland in the distance. It was ultra-touristy, but we still had some nice views. We checked out a Hindu temple and laughed at a deity that looks like a sleezy guy from the 70's. There was a mosque nearby (Benedicte called it a "mosquey" with her French accent). After soaking up the view some more, we decided we were very hungry and caught the cable car back down, then took the bus back into the center of Georgetown. We found a place that served nasi kandar, one of the dishes I'd been wanting to try in Penang, and it was fantastic. You start with a pile of rice on your plate, then just point at which curries you want to plop on top of the rice. The server didn't speak much English, and somehow he determined that I wanted every curry, so I had a colorful mound of food to eat. Benedicte struggled a little with the spiciness in her meal, but mine was great and I cleaned the plate. We also had some tasty milk teas. It was overall a great meal aside from the big rat we spotted in the corner.

We slowly wandered back towards the hostel, stopping for a while at a cafe to cool off and drink some more iced milk tea. This time we were at a Chinese restaurant, with a fat, loud, and angry Chinese waiter hustling all over the place. Benedicte originally studied prosthetics in France, then moved to French Polynesia after getting her certificate. She worked there for 5 years ("prosthetist" sounds like "prostitute" with a thick French accent), but left when she decided she was missing out on life, although I pointed out that she actually had a pretty sweet life by most people's standards. She left French Polynesia and has since been working random jobs until she has enough to travel, then finding a new job when the money runs out. She had been in Australia for 9 months previously. On this trip, she had met up with her boyfriend in the Philippines, where they met some "very friendly" Filipinos, who invited them to travel to their village with them. Apparently they were having a blast until the second night, where supposedly they were drugged and robbed while they were passed out. Benedicte lost 100 Euros, but her boyfriend lost $800 USD and 300 Euros, effectively ending his trip and forcing him back to France to find work. Thus Benedicte was left on her own for the remainder of the trip. We finished our second milk teas and ventured back out into the heat and over to our guest house. We talked to Ali, the guy at the front desk, for a long time. He can speak four languages - English, Malay, Tamil, and Urdu. He was born in Penang but his parents are from India. He was fun to talk to, and gave a great perspective of life in Penang.

It was getting close to dinner time, so we wandered off to find a pre-dinner drink. I wanted to find a bar that overlooked the ocean, but we ended up at the Eastern Oriental Hotel, which might be the most expensive hotel on the island. We headed to the fancy bar and discovered that they had seating outdoors, which was by the swimming pool and right up against the ocean. We had a drink there, then hustled over to the street food area and enjoyed one last Penang dish - mee goreng. I scarfed it down, grabbed my bags, and headed to the bus station for my 9:30pm departure. I passed six or seven transvestite prostitutes along the way; one of them waved his little fan on me as I sped past.

The bus left the station around 9pm, stopped briefly in Butterworth, and then arrived in Kuala Lumpur at 2am. I was dropped off at a bus station, then hounded by taxi drivers who saw a sleepy white guy with a big pack at 2am in a seedy part of town as an obvious opportunity. I fended them off, not really knowing what to do or where I was, and decided to go to a nearby open-air restaurant to watch some live soccer on TV and drink some mango juice. When that was finished, I caved and hired a taxi to drive me to KL Sentral, where I caught the 2:45am bus to the airport. I arrived at the airport around 4am, checked in, went through security, and hung out until my 6:55am flight. Thanks to awful planning and my deeply ingrained cheapness, I pulled an all-nighter on my last night in Malaysia.