Day 59 – Malaysia Day 4 – Back to Penang

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

I woke up early on our last day to finish some Skype calls. I was able to talk to everyone in my family for a decent amount of time, which was really nice. CONGRATULATIONS (again) to Melissa and David who are engaged! I’m really excited for both of you! Hopefully I’ll be able to get some fast internet like that again for an extended period of time before this trip is over. Beijing is probably our next/last chance. I’ll have my cell phone back again for a day when we reach Hawaii as well. WOW, is his trip going by FAST!! We’re well over half way done now :(

Anyway, back on topic. We took a taxi back to airport, which took a measly 30 minutes. We were expecting it to take a lot longer than that. However, the taxi driver dropped us off at the International terminal, but we wanted the domestic terminal. The two are about 15 minutes apart. This is probably our fault since we didn’t tell him the domestic terminal, just “the airport”. Luckily there were buses running between the two terminals on a regular basis and we had no problem getting there in time. One thing about KL that I didn’t mention before, there’s a Formula 1 race going on tomorrow (I think) or the next day and there were A LOT of tourists in town for that. A lot of Europeans/Australians and other huge racing fans. F1 is pretty big around there. Everywhere you went there were booths or signs promoting the race or selling stuff for it.

When we arrived in Penang we got a taxi back to the port. I got my wallet out of my pocket while we were in the car because I had to give him my green sheet (the green sheet is something they give us at every port listing emergency phone numbers, hospitals, the number for the ship and deans, and other useful information about the country that we’re in, including the address of our port). Somehow the wallet never made it back to my pocket. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t there until I was trying to get my ID out to board the tender. LUCKILY the cab driver saw my wallet back there and came back, running after me to give me my wallet back. SOOO LUCKY. That would have been such a pain to have lost my wallet in Malaysia. I would have had to cancel my two credit cards that were in there, get a new drivers license, lose all of my receipts and a copy of my passport, and like $50usd. I can’t believe how lucky I was that the taxi came back. Whew.

Right when we got back David and I went to the ferry ticket office to try to get a ticket to go to Langkawi tomorrow for Scuba diving. Langkawi is a 3 hour ferry ride, or a 40 minute plane ride. It’s a beautiful island with lots of resorts and natural habitat. There also isn’t anywhere to dive in and around Penang. We were able to get a ticket for the 8:30am ferry, but the 5:30pm one back was full, so we had to get the 2:30pm back. Definitely not as long as we were originally hoping for, but we should still have enough time for one afternoon dive, granted we find a place that is doing afternoon dives with no previous appointment.

After we took care of that we headed to Penang Hill, which is a huge hill in Penang that we wanted to hike up, but didn’t have enough time. There’s a trolley that will take you from the bottom to the top and back for 4 ringgits though so we decided to take that. The trolley goes SOOO slow though. It’s kind of ridiculous at times. It took half an hour to get to the top. By this time it was dark and foggy out. Actually, it was just foggy because we were in the clouds, but visibility was low. The restaurant that we wanted to go to closed at 9pm (we showed up right at 9). By this point we were all devastated and starving. We almost turned back when we heard a lady calling at us to sell us something to drink. All of the stores around her were closed, a few just finishing closing their gates. For some reason, she was still open. She didn’t speak great English but we told her all we wanted was some food so she made us some fried rice with chicken (again, I think it was chicken… there were a lot of stray dogs at the top of the hill... kidding!). A quote from David: “This is the best fried rice on the Earth.” He was right too. Yes, we were starving and would probably have ate anything at that time, but it was SOO good. We had to have two plates each, and these were big plates of fried rice and chicken. Best fried rice I’ve had in my life without a doubt. Then she tried charging us each less than $3 for the two plates we had. So we ended up giving her something like a 95% tip for the best fried rice any of us had ever had and for staying open and cooking for us.

Once we go to the bottom of the hill we quickly realized that the taxis had stopped waiting for people to come to the bottom of the hill. Now we’re stuck with no clue where to go to find a taxi back to our ship so we just started walking. We figured we’re bound to find a taxi soon enough, we’ve always seen them everywhere before. We end up walking probably a kilometer before we run into the lady that made us dinner, she ended up offering us a ride into Georgetown or until we found a taxi. Again, doing something she really didn’t have to for us. Turns out we were pretty far away from the where we wanted to be. We definitely would have missed the last tender back if she hadn’t came and picked us up. Originally we didn’t think that our adventure to Penang Hill was going to take that long so we also had planned on going to the night market. The night market is a little market in Penang that opens at 8pm and sells a lot of really cheap stuff. People were talking about a lot of movies that they picked up for $1 each and other fake accessories such as Bathing Ape’s for $5 USD. haha

We got back to the ship with plenty of time though. David and I had to catch the 7am tender though so we wouldn’t miss our ferry so we just went to bed. I was exhausted anyway.