Eating My Way Through Penang

This post is dedicated to my friend Micah who told me to stop posting pictures of me in exotic places and to start posting pictures of food because "your face looks the same in each photo, but delicious exotic food...that's revolutionary."

Coming from Cameron Highlands with cool air and remote nature was a big change from arriving in Georgetown on Penang Island where suddenly it was boiling hot outside and city building everywhere, though not the nightmarish concrete jungle of Kuala Lumpur. I had excellent luck arriving in Penang since there was a free hop on bus that took me from the jetty to the hostel I would be volunteering at for the next 3 weeks, my luck ended there. I arrived at the hostel when the heat was at its peak, my bladder was full, my phone was at 5% and nobody was there so I ended up locked out for 2+ hours. Eventually people staying at the hostel arrived and let me in and that is how I met Asha, Valerio and reunited with my friend Sergei who I'd met in Cameron Highlands. Asha said to me "so you're running the hostel?" and I corrected her that I was volunteering, not running anything! She replied by saying she'd been there weeks and nobody worked there other than the owner who was never ever around so I would in fact be running the place. It ended up being pretty true, in the last two weeks I've probaby seen him twice for less than 30 minutes total and the only instruction I've received so far is being given the masterkey. Luckily the work is beyond laid back and it's a small hostel so I've been getting to know everyone who checks in, and I'm free to leave for food or sightseeing whenever I want.

Clockwise: Char koay kak, Murtabak, Mee goreng, PB&Banana mang chang kui

The next day Felix from Germany checked in because some people from Cameron Highlands told him to come there, then the next day those two people, Marike and Charlie checked in too so for my first week there it was like a big Cameron Highland reunion with amazing people. We'd spend the days going to the national park, trekking to Monkey Beach and eating at the nearby night market while waiting for the bus back, going to Penang Hill where the hike uphill (it's always uphill) was nearly 3 hours, celebrating Marike's birthday by smearing cake all over her lovely face, seeing the Snake Temple, touring the street art of Georgetown, and visiting the Kek Lok Si Temple. In the evenings we'd usually head to Antara Bangsa, this slightly sketchy seeming but absolutely wonderful Chinese establishment where you can find cheap beer for take away or to drink in the alley with others. I'm extremely proud to say that I found it my first night there. A can of beer at the 7/11 is around 10rm (3.30CAD) however at this magical place it was 10rm for 3 beers so it's safe to say that I've been there multiple times and introduced multiple people to the place as well.

Now for the most important part of Penang!

Nearly all the sightseeing I've done in two weeks was done in my first 3 days, since then all I've done in Penang is eat. And eat. And eat. Penang is basically the food capital of Malaysia and I am constantly surrounded by cheap and delicious street food stalls and small restaurants where I can, and have, been gorging on Malaysian/Chinese/Indian food non-stop. My food obsession has gotten so bad that I googled and read so many food blogs about the Penang food that my offline map is nothing but restaurant and street stall locations sometimes with as little information as "Char Koay Kak stall in front of school, look for green t-shirt, may run out by 8pm". I'd wake up and start thinking of my next meal and while eating lunch I'd be wondering where to eat for dinner. This became such a recurring thing that the other friends staying at the hostel would jokingly (and some slightly seriously) say they were on the Christelle food tour of Penang. My favourite foods so far have been Char Koay Teow, Char Koay Kak, Wan Tan Mee, Roti, Nasi Lemak....okay basically everything except Rojak and Chee Cheong Fun! 

Clockwise: ???, Chinese mixed rice, Duck rice, Cendol

My Rules for Finding Food

1) If there are only westerners eating there, run

2) If the place seems to be crammed with locals/Chinese, force your way in a find a spot even if its with strangers because it is delicious 100% of the time

3) If people are waiting at a tiny street stall for a half hour for a plate of noodles, it is worth it. Get your ass in line. Especially if the service is horrendous and people are still queuing up

4) Eat everything

Clockwise: Wan Tan Mee, Egg&Cheese Mang Chang Kui, Char Koay Kak, Nasi Kandar

Clockwise: Pasembur, Thosai, Chee Cheong Fun, Moocakes

Lesson learned: I repeat - eat everything.

Trekking in the Highlands

I arrived in the Cameron Highlands after what felt like an incredibly long time in Kuala Lumpur (3 days, can you tell I'm not a fan of the city?) and I was instantly in love with the Tanah Rata and the highlands. I knew nothing about the place but when I got off the bus I was fell in love with the greenery and nature around me, the cool, sometimes cold, fresh air and the fact that it was so much smaller and laid back than KL. I checked into the CH Travelers Inn which ended up being great for meeting fellow backpackers and finding people to go trekking with and while talking with them and exchanging the usual backpacker sentences - "Where are you from? How long have you been traveling for? Where have you been? Where are you going to next?" I responded by saying I had been traveling for 3 months and I was instantly floored. My second day in Manila I'd spoken with a girl traveling for 3 months and I could barely imagine getting to that point since I'd become so accustomed to the whirlwind 12-17 day trips which were the only type of trips I could go on until now. In Manila I joked that I'd blink and suddenly it would be 3 months. It happened.

My first day there I met six girls all traveling solo, all german (they're taking over the Cameron Highlands),  and the next morning we decided to hike Path 1. Around the area there is about fourteen different treks you can do and we went with the one that was supposed to be the most difficult but had the promise of a delicious tea plantation at the end of it. We left the hostel clad in multicoloured cheap plastic rain ponchos, hit the main road and then hitched our way to the start of the path past the town of Brinchang. It was too hard as a group of seven so we split and four of us ended up in a car with the wonderful Jan, an absolute sweetheart who I was also able to practice a bit of Malay with. Halfway there, we saw the other group of girls walking so we asked Jan to stop and pick them up too, good thing so many people in the area drive pickup trucks. The walk up was steep and grueling and after weeks of lounging on a beach and barely even walking around I was loving any amount of physical exercise. It helped that we were surrounded with stunning views of the tea fields all around us. We made it to the top of Gunung Brinchang and sadly the stunning views did not follow since at 2000m the view we had looked like a blank sheet of paper. While the skies in KL are white due to smog or burning fires from Indonesia, the Cameron Highlands is often blanketed with thick sheets of mist so it's common to see nothing at the peak. We entered the mossy forest in hopes of finding the giant rafflesia flower but when the patch became so muddy that we were almost knee deep and the people coming from the opposite direction looked like mud monsters, the 5 girls turned back leaving Isabella and I to venture further on our own. We never did find the flower, apparently it is in bloom for an extremely short amount of time, but we did emerge from the Mossy Forest also looking like mud monsters and realizing that out of the sweaty dirty backpacker group we were now the worst.

We walked down to the Sungai Palas Tea Plantation to try the boh tea, however the poor tea was completely outshone by the scones and even more so by the cakes. We finished our cakes and sat talking for a while as we were all eyeing up the abandoned table next to us that still had a nearly full piece of cake, and to make it worse, it was the banana carrot cake which was the best of the seven we tried. Finally one of the girls grabs the cake and we end up helping her finish it....which started a bad trend as 2 other neglected cakes made their way to our table. I'd gone from staying in a hotel in the heart of a metropolitan city to hitchhiking, being covered head to toe in mud, and eating abandoned cake. I freaking loved it.

For some insane reason all the people in Cameron Highlands stay for 1-2 nights, however I liked the place making me the anomaly who stayed for 5 nights. After that first day there, the rest of the days passed in roughly the same manner. Say goodbye to friends who were leaving, meet new friends (likely German girls) the night before or the morning of, go trekking with the new friends, eat lunch and dinner at the two insanely cheap indian restaurants Sri Brinchang or Kumars that are next to each other, drink beer at the bonfire around the Jungle Bar. Repeat. I'd change things up a bit by doing a different path each day and by switching up my hostel halfway through because I found out Kangs Travelers Inn was only 12 ringit a night ($4CAD, half price of CH Travellers) and it was attached to the Jungle Bar. On my last day there I decided to skip trekking and take a rest, something that lasted until around noon when some new girls arrived and after talking with them for 5 minutes we were on our way to tackle the hardest paths that would lead us to Brinchang where we would hopefully make it there for the weekend night market. I'd like to say I was talked into it but I was the one already bored with doing nothing and itching to hike more who suggested it. The path was fun but the night market was easily the highlight. I made sure to eat as much as humanly possible and for the fifth time in the last 4 days I had people comment that they enjoyed watching me enjoy eating. I'm not sure how to take that but the other two girls were helping me drink the leftover chocolate from the chocolate covered strawberries so they're in no place to judge me. One last night at the Jungle Bar and the next morning I would make my way to Penang to begin volunteering at a hostel.

The Trails I Did

Path 1 - Took ages and was crazy steep but beautiful views and cake

Path 4 - Super easy, only 30 minutes in one direction, you get to see the pretty Tappia Waterfalls and the not so pretty polluted river

Path 9, 7, 8 - This took us 3 hours though we were told it would take 5.5-6 hours and met some people who gave up part way in. It was a fun trek and while it was super steep it was not Very Difficult as described by the official tours

Path 5, part of 3, 2 - Path 5 was an easy 1 hour trek, we stayed on path 3 for a half hour, and then path 2 was the shortest bit but possibly the toughest of the trails we did and took 45 minutes. The end of this route led to night markets.

Lesson Learned: Look up! When you're walking down a difficult path you spend so much time watching your feet and where you step that you might miss the amazing scenery and things going on around you.

This is what 12 ringit a night looks like

The lovely Dutch girls who hiked trail 7, 8, 9 with me

Tappia Falls - Trail 4

Failing at being a Backpacker

Melaka

After leaving Aseania resort I met up with a South African friend I'd met earlier at Aseania and together we headed for Melaka. Unlike myself who is so cheap I'll put up with any sketchy hostel, my friend insisted on getting a proper hotel room so next thing I know we're checking into the Rucksack Caratel which is a month old place that was beautiful, great location and pretty quirky (i.e. the 'please clean my room' signs said 'help! Our room has been taken over by leprechauns! please chase then away')

In Melaka it is a pretty and laid back town with a river running through the historical center and the Dutch buildings are painted red and the streets are filled with stores selling scary durian concoctions and baba nyonya reataurants which are based off the cultural mash-up of the Chinese men (or sometimes Dutch or Portuguese) marrying Malay women. The baba nyonya food was good, the durian concoctions I found a loophole around. I'd promised a friend I'd try durian ice cream so at an ice cream parlour I had a sample of it than then tried to drown out the taste with a scoop of non poisonous ice cream - mmm white chocolate macadamia.

In Melaka there was a lot of walking around the rivers, and visiting Fritz, the Dutch guy from Aseania who took us to this little hole in the wall Indian place with excellent tandoori. We  were supposed to leave Friday but after hearing about the weekend night market we extended our stay and that Friday I gorged on food. Coconut shakes, fried veggie cakes, dumplings, satay, ice cream in a freshly made fish shaped cone, you name it and after the night market we ended up at Eleven drinking beer and tequila and sharing a few glasses of single malt with the owner of the bar and his brother who blew our minds with excellent magic tricks. 

These freaky neon bikes were everywhere

Kuala Lumpur

We eventually left Melaka and headed North to Kuala Lumpur which was almost like a shock to my system being in such a big noisy, dirty, busy city after 2 months on a quiet island. Even Melaka was like an adjustment period but it still was pretty small in comparison. In KL we stayed near the Bukit Bintang station right in the heart of downtown facing the Kuala Lumpur Pavilion. The city was busy,  full of shopping (which I don't care about), western chain restaurants (don't care about), and overpriced attractions (especially dont care about). In the 3 days we stayed there we saw the Petronas Twin Towers, the KL Tower, Chinatown area and a bunch of westernized restaurants (my friend wasn't a big fan of Malay food). After 3 nights in the big city both of us were itching to leave so he headed to Langkawi and I was hopping on a bus to the Cameron Highlands and it was only as the bus was pulling away that I realized I had no clue what to expect at the Cameron Highlands or whether the name was an actual town or just a region but after KL I was up for any change.

Lesson learned: It was nice spending a few nights in hotels (and swiping all the free toiletries!) but I am still at that stage in my life and travels where I need to be staying in questionable hostels, and weird accomodations full of equally dirty backpackers because the thought of sketchy hostels, dirt cheap street food-that may make me sick, travelling in cheap but uncomfortable transportation and meeting ridiculous penny pinching backpackers like me still excites me. Again, I may be a masochist.

Leaving the Islands

After nearly two months bumming around on the beach at Aseania Resort it finally hit that I had one month left on my Malaysian visa and I'd only seen 3 islands that were all located near the Singaporean border and the rest of the country had barely been explored. Once this realization hit I gave myself one last week there and told Jasbeer. During that last week Jasbeer was gone till the weekend and the resort was somehow nearly empty so it wasn't a super busy week. I did however have many great conversations over cold tigers with Fritz,  the Dutch expat friend of the boss who  was staying there for weeks fixing up his sailboat. We even made plans for a sailing trip before he returned to Melaka but the last day there was not even the faintest breeze. Oh well, c'est la vie! At least working the beach bar was easier now that the terrible 200 songs John and I now knew by heart were deleted and replaced with 2000+ actual good songs by this South African guy George, thus saving our sanity or what remained of it after hearing the gangster boogie song a zillion times.

During my last week I got to hang out with the staff a fair amount too, which meant many talks with Halim and the restaurant boys and talking and joking around with John at the beach bar. Eewyn and I would hang out at the jetty and one very slow evening the indian boys were playing cricket on a small field and I was dragged on the field to join them.  Sadly I don't think I have a career in the world of cricket. After playing cricket everyone leapt into the sea and for once I held back because it was the one time I was not wearing a bathing suit (stupid me) then I realized I could just swim Malay girl style - fully clothed. We played catch in the water and two of the guys made us race afterwards, of course I lost miserably but that evening was pretty great.

Four days before I'd be leaving a new volunteer Amber from California arrived. Terrible timing because she was a really cool person and super easy to get along with. We bonded over drinks and just how cheap we were, so with any luck we may get to travel together again in the future since it seems we have similar travel styles. On my very last night the resort was pretty much dead so they decided to have a big staff dinner where everyone from volunteer to restaurant to housekeeping staff gathered. The boys drank beer and Amber and I assembled sangrias and it was a perfect last night hanging out with everyone. Plus once the music broke out all the indian boys were suddenly tearing it up on the dance floor...and I was somehow dragged out too! The next day was almost surreal leaving since I'd been there for so long but I was bound for Melaka and still needed to see the rest of Malaysia.

My Friends on Pulao Besar

Me and Jessica, the baby bird we rescued 

The spa girls and I

The beach bar team - me, Amber and John

The Aseania volunteers

My wonderful boss Jasbeer