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Penang, Malaysia; one of Tom's unnecessary adventures
I expected an island fringed with palm-trees, the occasional flunkey the only sign of human habitation. I think I may have got it confused with Phuket.
I stood this afternoon at Fort Cornwallis, in Georgetown, on what was until about 1850 known as Prince of Wales Island; the British are nothing if not comprehensive in making sure people know who they've been colonised by. Georgetown, normally known as Penang after the island it sits on (the other half of Penang is Butterworth, across a 13km bridge), was, until Singapore got going, the capital of British Malaya; it seems always to have been a major city of the Empire.
It's now a city of 1.5 million or so, replete with temples, mosques and churches (the Malay people have been Islamic for a long time; Chinese Buddhist and Daoist colonists have been coming in since 1400 or so; the British naturally started off by building churches, and their empire caused the arrival of a large number of Indian Hindus). Toured temples in the morning: a nice unsubtle hundred-foot gold reclining Buddha, a Burmese temple full of ceremonial fishponds each with its list of bylaws topped by 'Do Not Release Tortoises In This Pond'.
Penang has about my favorite city setting: tall hills dropping down to the sea. I dined (on beef with ginger, which was nice, and bits of fried duck with cold pickled jellyfish, which on the whole I won't try again) at the top of the KOMTAR building, the tallest in town; after visiting Fort Cornwallis and the History of Penang museum, I took the funicular railway (typical Victorian engineering; take the 700-metre hill and build a one-in-two funicular all the way up, in two sections with an interchange station in the middle; it makes the little Snowdon train look like a toy) up the hill, and walked down through the jungle.
NB (1) It gets dark quite quickly in the tropics
NB (2) Humans don't like walking along poorly-marked paths in jungle at night
So I carried on down the (steep, slippery, at one thankfully-lit point covered for about fifteen yards with an three-foot-thick layer of cut giant bamboo - a perfect place for an Indiana Jones fight scene) path, getting more and more worried, until I reached the railway. Deciding that getting shouted at by Malaysian police was marginally preferable to breaking something by tripping over a teak-log in the dark jungle, I walked down about five hundred of the safety steps by the side of the funicular to the interchange station, where my arrival was entirely unnoticed and I boarded the next funicular down.
The safety steps were themselves interesting; two feet wide, about six inches deep, about six inches of empty space between each pair of steps, a wire rope down the side to hold onto, and the whole thing hanging over up to thirty or forty feet of drop down to trackless parts of jungle. There was a fair amount of clearance from the track, though no train passed while I was walking down (as I knew from the timetable; this is not a busy line).
Got to the bottom, taxi shared with a nice South African couple to my hotel, wrote (as you may be noticing) many Livejournal entries, and so to bed.
I stood this afternoon at Fort Cornwallis, in Georgetown, on what was until about 1850 known as Prince of Wales Island; the British are nothing if not comprehensive in making sure people know who they've been colonised by. Georgetown, normally known as Penang after the island it sits on (the other half of Penang is Butterworth, across a 13km bridge), was, until Singapore got going, the capital of British Malaya; it seems always to have been a major city of the Empire.
It's now a city of 1.5 million or so, replete with temples, mosques and churches (the Malay people have been Islamic for a long time; Chinese Buddhist and Daoist colonists have been coming in since 1400 or so; the British naturally started off by building churches, and their empire caused the arrival of a large number of Indian Hindus). Toured temples in the morning: a nice unsubtle hundred-foot gold reclining Buddha, a Burmese temple full of ceremonial fishponds each with its list of bylaws topped by 'Do Not Release Tortoises In This Pond'.
Penang has about my favorite city setting: tall hills dropping down to the sea. I dined (on beef with ginger, which was nice, and bits of fried duck with cold pickled jellyfish, which on the whole I won't try again) at the top of the KOMTAR building, the tallest in town; after visiting Fort Cornwallis and the History of Penang museum, I took the funicular railway (typical Victorian engineering; take the 700-metre hill and build a one-in-two funicular all the way up, in two sections with an interchange station in the middle; it makes the little Snowdon train look like a toy) up the hill, and walked down through the jungle.
NB (1) It gets dark quite quickly in the tropics
NB (2) Humans don't like walking along poorly-marked paths in jungle at night
So I carried on down the (steep, slippery, at one thankfully-lit point covered for about fifteen yards with an three-foot-thick layer of cut giant bamboo - a perfect place for an Indiana Jones fight scene) path, getting more and more worried, until I reached the railway. Deciding that getting shouted at by Malaysian police was marginally preferable to breaking something by tripping over a teak-log in the dark jungle, I walked down about five hundred of the safety steps by the side of the funicular to the interchange station, where my arrival was entirely unnoticed and I boarded the next funicular down.
The safety steps were themselves interesting; two feet wide, about six inches deep, about six inches of empty space between each pair of steps, a wire rope down the side to hold onto, and the whole thing hanging over up to thirty or forty feet of drop down to trackless parts of jungle. There was a fair amount of clearance from the track, though no train passed while I was walking down (as I knew from the timetable; this is not a busy line).
Got to the bottom, taxi shared with a nice South African couple to my hotel, wrote (as you may be noticing) many Livejournal entries, and so to bed.
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