Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Customs took a long time this morning to clear the ship so we weren’t able to get off until around 11 or 12. We have to tender in Malaysia. Basically all that means is that we can’t dock on land so we have to take out our ships lifeboats to get to land. This is VERY inconvenient for everyone. They only run the tenders every 30 minutes, and the tenders only run from 7am-1am the following day. So not only do we always have to wait for the next tender to come, but they also have to unload, re-load up, and then leave for land which is only about a 5 minute ride. Luckily, this is the only port that we have to deal with tendering and I won’t be here for 3 of the nights.
Right when we got off of the ship we went to find some internet and an ATM so we could book our tickets and hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur is referred to by most people as simply KL, so I may do that just to make this go quicker. There are a ton of banks around where we came in so finding an ATM was easy. We had to walk around a little longer until we could find an Internet Café that worked though. The price was 3 ringgits for an hour. The exchange rate is $1USD=3.2Ringgits so it cost a little less than a dollar for an hour, which I’ll take any day!
After getting everything taken care of we walked around the area in Penang. I’m still not certain if we were in Penang or Georgetown, they’re basically the same thing. Georgetown is more likely to be found on a map though. We ended up eating at this place just off the street. None of us really understood the menu’s so we just went up to the chef and pointed to the things that we wanted on our plate. None of us were really sure what we were eating. I’m pretty sure it was chicken though :).
It’s HOT and HUMID today. The guy where we ate told us that it’s also rained every day for the past 2 weeks. It was sprinkling for a while we were walking around, but nothing that we had to take cover for.
Jim had 3 hours of dock time for turning in his customs forms 9 minutes late when we were leaving India (haha) so after eating we went to meet up with him at the dock. The tender schedule is totally unpredictable so we just kind of guessed a time that we could meet up with him off of the ship once he could come off.
One little side note about where we typically dock. Taxi’s know when we are coming and are always waiting outside the ship when we arrive. They also had a place to buy postcards, exchange currency, and buy souvenirs right near where our tenders docked, which is something that we haven’t had before. The taxi drivers here (they actually spell it Teksi) were SOOO annoying the first time we got off of the ship. This being 7th port we’ve learned how to deal with taxi’s and just walk away, but these guys hounded us and followed us for a block before they finally got the strong hint that we were getting annoyed with them and weren’t about to get in a vehicle with them. By far the most annoying taxi’s that we’ve had. Once we’re in the vehicle it’s all fine. I would rather go to THEM instead of the other way around though. Also, just like India, Mauritius and South Africa, they will try to rip you off at first because they think we don’t know an accurate price for a taxi. Then once we’ve worked them down to a reasonable price and they’ve taken us to our destination, they will try to make us pay their original price. It’s extremely annoying to say the least.
Anyway, once we got organized and figured out where we wanted to go we checked out one of the many malls in the area. Nothing too exciting there, it was very modern, and basically the same thing as you would find in the US.
After the mall we headed to Upper Penang Road for some dinner and to check out the scene. This is where there are a lot of restaurants and clubs playing live music. A funny thing about all of the music that was played, EVERY song was an American hit at one point. The song could range anywhere from 1 year ago to 10 years ago. All American pop music being played by a local Malaysian band. It was kind of funny, but at the same time interesting to see that they don’t really have their own music culture that’s popular. Honestly there wasn’t one song that was played that I hadn’t heard before.
After dinner and walking around for a while we saved more than enough time to get back to the dock to get on our tender so we didn’t miss it and were stuck in Penang with nowhere to go for until 7am
The landscape and buildings in and around Penang are very modern. Lots of tall buildings that can’t be more than 20 years old. Poverty isn’t nearly as big of a problem in Malaysia as India. The two are almost NOTHING alike. Small mountains/large hills surround the area. Malaysia as a country also consists of hundreds of different islands off of its coast.
Malaysia struck oil something like 30 or so years ago and has been in rapid development ever since. It’s good to see a country using its oil money to better the country as a whole and develop big industries and a solid economy.
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