Penang, Malaysia Travelogue

 In mid-October I took a long weekend to Penang, Malaysia. Penang is an island off the Malay Peninsula at the very north part of the country, almost as far north as the Thai part of the Malay Peninsula. 

Just a few photos to give you a sense of this magnificent island, with lots of great natural beauty and the city of George Town, an urbanscape built in the late 1800s. George Town has been restored and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Loved my visit and would definitely return.




One of the coolest places I visited was the Entopia Butterfly Dome.  It's a gigantic tropical garden of colorful flowers covered by a dome, filled with zillions of butterflies.  There are so many inside they land all over you, especially if you dress in yellow and the butterflies think you're a gigantic flower, as this woman learned.



 At the Tropical Spice Garden.  This garden of several hectares, contains hundreds of tropical plants, including a multitude of spices and edible plants.  It's an astonishing garden and learning experience for the person like me who knows little of tropical botany.






George Town is the heritage neighborhood filled with lots of restored buildings. Additionally, it's now a center for the arts. The walls of the buildings are covered with murals and art. It has a wonderful, funky vibe.  Sadly much of the art is deteriorating and needs restoration. 



Cheah Kongsi ancestral clan house was built in the mid-1800s and was constructed as a place for members of the Cheah clan who had migrated from China to work in the tin mines, to revere their ancestors and to gather fellowship and mutual support in an alien country.  It's one of so many beautifully-restored spaces like this in Penang.



Typical of the colonial architecture in Penang.



Great street food all over Penang--it's something the city is known for.





Stayed in the Campbell House, a beautiful heritage hotel in Penang.  It was built in 1903 and originally housed sailors and pilgrims awaiting ships to take them to the Hajj in Mecca. Now it's a stunning, luxury hotel.  Pictured here is the Peacock Room where I stayed.






On the waterfront are five remaining "jetties", communities built on stilts in the 1850s for workers, mainly those from China. These jetties continue to house people and businesses designed to attract tourists.  I visited the Chew Jetty.  These jetties are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.  There are views on the jetty where you almost feel transported to the past.






Finally, perched on a hill above Penang is Kek Lok Si, Buddhist temple.  The pagoda is designed in three architectural styles:  the bottom part is Chinese, the middle part is Thai, and the top tier is in Burmese style.  At the very top of the hill is a massive statue of Guanyin the female bodhisattva associated with compassion.  

Lots more in Penang, but these are the main highlights. It's a pleasant place that would be a lovely stop for anyone visiting Malaysia and it's a fairly short flight from Jakarta for Indonesian tourists.  




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Killing Fields Museum: Siem Reap

Image
In an earlier post here, I showed the Choeung Ek Genocide Center, the Cambodian Killing Fields near Phnom Penh. While that was the largest of the Killing Fields during the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge reign of terror, it was certainly not the only one in the nation.  There are approximately 100 Killing Field sites that have been identified throughout Cambodia where approximately 1.7 million people were murdered--an astonishing 21% of the nation's population at that time. When I finished visiting the Angkor Wat temple complex, I made a request of my driver that we stop at the Siem Reap Museum, near the site of the main Killing Field at Cambodia's 2nd largest city.  He seemed surprised that after exploring the marvels of human creativity, spirituality and achievement at Angkor Wat I would would want to visit on the same day a place that recorded the depths of human depravity.  I don't think anyone visits this museum anymore.  The woman in the ticket booth was reclining on a h...
Read more

Ta Prohm: "The Tree Temple"

Image
  Ta Prohm Temple is definitely my favorite temple beyond main Angkor Wat.  When the entire archeological complex was "discovered" by the French in the 19th Century, most of it was in ruins and they embarked on a decades-long restoration project.  Though the French are no longer in charge of Cambodia, constant restoration efforts are continuing at the Angkor complex to make sure the temples survive into the next decades. The French made a brilliant decision when they started their restoration to keep one of the temples in the semi-ruined state that they found the entire site.  They chose Ta Prohm to keep in a semi-ruined state, though some restoration is constantly done there, just to keep the structures from completely falling down. Ta Prohm is somewhat unique also, in that, while parts of it served as a temple, the majority of the structure served as a monastery and has a distinctive design as opposed to what one would find at more-standard temples.    Ta...
Read more

You Can Learn Much About Red State Americans at Fort Cody

Image
  Earlier in my U.S. trip, I visited my son in North Platte, Nebraska.  It's the reddest, Trumpiest part of a very red state.  And during my visit I stopped at Fort Cody, a fake U.S. Army fort built in the 1960s to lure tourists off the newly-built superhighways as they traveled to vacation destinations out in the Western U.S. like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. That's why you display the two headed calf that was born on a farm in Nebraska in the 1940s, then stuffed after it died having lived only three days. This kind of oddity would be advertised as something to draw curious tourists off the highway to buy the souvenirs in your tourist attraction.  As I visited Fort Cody, the fake Army fort, I realized that this "tourist trap" was exclusively designed for Red-State, MAGA Trumpists and totally reflects their values and mental picture of what America is and should be.  Luckily, you don't have to visit Fort Cody, but I can interpret it for you and show yo...
Read more