Penang Georgetown

From K.L., it took us 5 hours by bus to get to Penang, a small peninsula northwest of K.L. Here, we didn't need to take the ferry as the peninsula can be reached via a bridge from the mainland.

As Malaysia was under British rule, you can still find many colonial houses here, although many of them are in poor condition. Some are nicely painted. However, what you will mostly find in Georgetown is the street art... many paintings on house walls, wire figures, and texts. You can see them in the pictures. There are also many high-rise buildings on this peninsula, but here you will see a significant mix of large and small, old and new.

There is a lot to explore in terms of landscape, but it is very touristy. This was partly because we were traveling on the weekend and it is also vacation time here.

We went on a hike, took a bus 🚎 to Turtle Beach. Bus, train, car 🚗 are all very cheap, by the way.

When we arrived, we actually wanted to take a longer walk through the jungle to Monkey Beach, but this path was not passable due to a landslide. So we decided to go to Turtle Beach, get picked up by a boat from there, and then be taken to Monkey Beach by boat to swim 🏊‍♀️ a bit. But... we walked to the beach 🏖, which took about one and a half hours of hiking, sometimes uphill and sometimes downhill. We arrived and the boat 🚣‍♀️ was already there. We got on and off we went. Not even 10 minutes into the ride, the waves started... I can only say... we were like a nutshell in the water 💦 and you slap your hand in the water... as quickly as the waves slapped us in the face, we couldn't dry ourselves off. Eventually, we were completely soaked, but the best was yet to come. The engine of the nutshell failed... and the co-pilot, or whatever his name was, didn't know what to do. The captain of the nutshell was struggling with the engine... and the nutshell was getting closer and closer to the rocks, so he had to throw the anchor to prevent it from crashing into the rocks. And the engine kept coughing, throwing the anchor again and again, hoping it wouldn't get any closer to the rocks. The only thought I had was, thank God the rocks are round, so it won't hurt too much when we have to jump out... and the captain was already frantically fighting with the engine, which made me start to have heart palpitations 🥶... and that means something. But just before we hit the rocks, our good karma helped us again...🥵 and the engine finally started again. We decided that we didn't want to see any other beach anymore, we just wanted to go home.

But okay, no risk, no fun 😱🥵🤪 So, here are some pictures, but not from our boat trip 🤪