Bus journey number...

The bus to Penang was, by comparison, luxurious. Big reclining seats, air conditioning, plenty of room, not too shabby, and the journey was relatively straight-forward. Scott and I met this older Malay couple on the bus, the husband had been in the army and had trained at Sandhurst. They offered us strange fruit and complained about the bus company's bad customer service.

We arrived in Penang, not exactly where we were expecting to arrive but there nonetheless, and headed to Georgetown where we were both staying. I hadn't been able to get a room at the hostel that Scott was in, so exchanged email with him, and made my way to the Hutton Lodge. This was a clean, comfortable place in a good area for food and exploring. This first night was spent with my dorm room mates, Dom and Neil, and we headed out for an amazing meal of dim sum just around the corner from the hostel.

A few beers and a chat later, and after hearing tales of Penang Hill from other guests, we resolved to head to bed and get up and see the view there the following day.

It's pretty easy to get buses to places just of Georgetown. We headed down to the local bus station and quickly figured out where we needed to go to get the bus - Malay people are incredibly helpful and friendly and most people speak very good English. We were shortly on the bus where Dom soon made friends with a group of school children and a local gentleman, almost all of whom shook our hands when leaving the bus. Penang Hill loomed into sight (slightly less spectacular than expected perhaps, but I was still giving it a chance) and we went to buy tickets for the train journey up the sheer hill. The train is painfully slow, they also pack it out like the Central Line at 6pm (bearing in mind everyone is standing and the train is at a 45 degree angle).

There is not much to see on the half hour journey to the top; it doesn't even seem like you're that high. However, the view from the top (700m above sea level) is great: full panoramic views over the whole of Georgetown, right over the river Prai and to the Prai River Bridge. There were also hundreds of Halloween-inspired spiders strung up in big webs above our heads, which actually fascinated me more than the view. After some wandering about and a couple of attacks by monkeys (Neil darn near lost a hand when a team of monkeys went for his cornetto) we headed down. Unfortunately I found the journey down even more boring than the one up; it felt like that part of a roller coaster when it's about to get really scary and fast, but it just never did.

We headed back to Penang and out for some food at the Red Garden night market, I had this amazing sweet and spicy soup with tuna called Laksa and some flat noodles with egg and seafood. The remainder of the evening was spent in the usual way: whiling away the time chatting with a bumper-sized bottle of Tiger. Marvellous stuff.