Sep/091
Bang Bang Penang!
After being on my way to Thailand from Indonesia, I expected my stopover in Penang Malaysia to be just that, a stop over. But what I found in this industrial tourist spot for Malaysians and Singaporeans was a really cool cultural cocktail with wild super friendly people and some of the best food I’ve ever eaten with four vegetarian restaurants within a fifteen block radius.
Along the way I found my now weeklong travel buddy Helen from the UK. Being both Persian and French she was a great companion with my own mutt self to explore the lovely pluralisms of Chinese, Indian, and Malay culture in Georgetown, the urban center of Penang. All of the cheap guesthouses in Georgetown are located on Love Lane Inn – which you would think by its name would be the red light district, but instead a line of cheap guesthouses inhabited by backpackers, rickshaw drivers, transients, wanderers, and drug addicts alike.
Helen after traveling southeast Asia for seven months was more attune to the dodgier of accommodations, and we chose the cheapest place we could find, The Han Wai Guesthouse. While we were warned that crack fiends and glue sniffers inhabited the place it ended up being a good deal at 9 Malaysian Ringits each. There were a couple of other white people there but its was mostly local families, a single Chinese mom who was going to art school who stayed at the guest house with her son, an Indian family who owned the rickshaw parked out front, the very sweet inn keepers who looked after us, and slept on the reception desk during the day and watched discovery channel documentaries at night.
The first restaurant we were recommended was the Sri Ananda Bahw Restaurant, serving only vegetarian grub, a north Indian thali consisted of nine different small dishes, and the garlic naan was accompanied by an absolutely mind blowing sample of their tandori soy chicken. It’ts not often I get to taste vegetarian and vegan food that is a COMPLETLEY new taste, I don’t even know how to describe it. Somewhere between barbeque and Indian clove wonder. A little lime made the favor complexly electric. I returned several times, and then I ordered the soy fish, and got sick for a day. Don’t order the soy fish!
There were several restaurants we visited, but definitely one of the best was the food court we were invited to by our new Malaysian dad, Wong who we met along the polluted beaches. After chatting us up, the seventy one year old retired watch dealer, who lost his wife to cancer three years ago invited us to dinner and drinks at a food court that represented Panag quite well. Food from all over the wold, expensive beer because its taxed by the muslim government and cover band playing top forty songs. We talked and drank talk and drank, and then I got sick from the soy fish poisoning and beer.
The biggest disappointment of Penang was the “Snake Temple”. When I saw snake temple on the map I got glimpses of a snake worshiping Buddhist cult injecting themselves with viper poison to achieve nirvana, but what we got was an ordinary Chinese Buddhist temple with a poorly run snake farm on the side of it with monkeys chained to trees and in cages. Very very sad shit. Don’t go to the snake temple.
We did get to cruise through all kinds of 3rd world malls, wonderful fruit carts, meet crazy sweet people everywhere, and did get our prayer on in a great temple situated on a hill. I’ll definitely miss Penang. On the bus to Thailand now where the first stop is Krabi, apparently a rock climbers paradise. I think it may take a bucket of PCP to get me up a mountain using my bare hands, but being in the place that inspired me to take this journey is exciting.
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September 16th, 2009
Interesting; thanks.. and the differences between Malaysia and Tokyo