We have been here in Langkawi now for a few days, and I am not at all embarrassed to say that we have not done much of anything!

We have to return home soon, and so our plan was to have a few days of simple relaxation, and that is what we have been doing. There is a lot of island here that is worth exploring but we have decided to save it for a return trip, and our last few days have been mostly filled with reading books by the pool and the occasional short walk out to the food market or along the shore a few blocks away from our hotel.

We changed our plans for the end of this year’s vacation a bit and instead of going down the Malaysian coast towards Kuala Lumpur, we decided to take our last few days at a hotel with a pool in Langkawi. So this morning it is up at the crack of dawn – well actually it is up when the front desk wakes us up to tell us our taxi is waiting and we have to scramble to get out the door in about 5 mins to ensure that we don’t miss our ferry!!

The ferry from Penang to Langkawi is about 3 hours so rather than try and watch the subtitled movie through the back of some guy’s head I decide to catch a few extra winks on the way over. After our arrival at Langkawi, and our checkin at our hotel, I pop online to connect with the guys back home to finish up the last bit of work related to the server issues we had yesterday. Today goes much better than yesterday, and after about an hour of installation and testing everything is working properly on the new permanent solution – back to relaxation mode for me!!

Mrs. Columbus has scouted out the pool area and the sun is shining so once I pack up the work and we pop out for a quick bite to eat, it is back to the pool for the rest of the day, just relaxing and taking in some sun.

I;m sure we will take in some activities or a tour in the next couple of days here, but the plan is to mostly just take it easy and enjoy our last few days in Asia before heading home.

We had planned to get an earlier start today than we yesterday, and head out to the main beach area of Penang called Batu Ferrengi, and then Mrs. Columbus had some visions of going to the night market there at the end of the day, but that is not to be 🙁

It turns out that there is a problem with one of the computers at the office that needs serious attention so I need to re-arrange my plans. I am going to have to spend the next few hours working with some of the guys back home to try and get things working again. Mrs. Columbus takes the change mostly in stride and rather than wait for me for an indefinite amount of time heads off on her own for a couple of hours to do a little exploring.

Several hours later we are still not happy with the solution we have to the systems problem, but we have a bandage in place and a plan to finish up a permanent solution the next day. Thanks to Dave and Owen for their efforts – you guys rock! By the time we have the band-aid in place it is mid afternoon here, so the plan to go to the beach is not going to work.

Plan B is to walk down to the part of the historic district called Little India and see if we can find some tasty Indian food for an early dinner. Penang was a crossroads trading post for many Asian and SE Asian countries in the 1800s and 1900s and became a melting pot of different cultures and foods – true to it’s name Little India is an area about 3-4 blocks on each side that is a concentration of shops, restaurants and street vendors all sending Indian foods or goods. (And yes, that really is a guy cutting keys from a street cart!!)

After a delicious dinner we decide to walk down to the waterfront where there is a nice seawall to walk along and look at some of the historic buildings in this part of the city. It is starting to get into the evening now, and Mrs. Columbus decides to pass on her shopping adventure and go back to the hotel with me to get packed up. We are moving on to Langkawi tomorrow, and the taxi is coming at 7:30am to take us to the ferry, so an early night is an easy sell.

The previous long day of travel finally hit home and this morning we slept in until almost 10am. Given that we have missed any sort of breakfast we decide that we should just get moving and find some early lunch along the road.

We have decided to catch the local bus again and ride out to the north-west corner of Penang Island (Pulau Penang) and go to the Penang National Park.  The west side of the island is mostly all mountainous, including the area that we were in last night at Penang Hill, and roughly the top quarter is a protected park area. Thinking there will be some interesting views, and that the air might get a little more clear out from the main part of the city we set that as our destination and head off for the bus station.

Having missed breakfast we are a little hungry, but the road we are walking along does not seem to have a lot of options available for a regular sit-down meal. Every once in a while we see a large open, semi-covered area that looks sort of like a North American beer garden but with some sort of food service inside. After walking past a few of these places hanger starts to win out, and we decide to go into the next one we see.

The food service is sort of like what you might expect at the mall (altho not as fancy of course) with a number of different dishes of food. The bad news is that most of the people working here do not speak very good english and none of the food is marked as to what it is, so it is Russian Roulette of food. After a bit of gesturing with the staff we think that the process is to load up a plate and take it to the front where they charge you by volume – on that premise I think I should try a little bit of anything that looks tasty so that I will know what to have or not to have next time. It turns out that it works different than that – you are charged by the number of different items you have on your plate, so I have lined myself up with a sampler plate that is a little pricy by SE Asia terms. As it turns out, most of the food is fairly tasty, sadly however we still don’t know what the tasty items are actually called so the next meal is bound to be hit and miss also 🙂

After lunch we find our way to the central bus station, with the help of a few friendly locals, to make our way out to the national park. I was initially quite impressed with the bus system here – there were lots of busses, and they did not look like hand-me-downs from some other country, but I was fully unprepared for the central bus station. The Komtar station is where every public bus in Penang converges right in the middle of downtown, and it is here where the chaos begins. There are hundreds of people here all waiting for buses, and of course people arriving all the time to change buses, etc. The boarding process can only be described as a scrum of starving people lunging forward for a single meal! The sea of people surges forward to the open door until a security guy jumps in once the bus is packed to the rafters so that the driver can close the door. It takes us two rounds of this to finally manage to get in the right place in the scrum to get carried forward to the door by the rest of the mass.

The bus is so jammed full of people that the driver does not even stop along most of the first half of the route unless someone is getting off.  In the rare place where we do stop many people just look in the window at the crowd of people and wave the bus off. By the time we reach the half way point in the route enough people have gotten off that while it is still standing room only, you do not have to get a pre-nuptial agreement from the person joined to you at the hip. By the time we get to the national park about an hour later we are I think the only people left on the bus…

Perhaps it is because it is Ramadan here, or maybe it is getting late in the day, but there are hardly any people at the park – which I guess it is nice for us to mostly have the place to ourselves! We do a little looking around and decide that we are going to take about a 2 hour hike across the corner of the park and then have hired a boatman to meet us on a beach on the opposite side for the return trip at around sunset.

The first part of the hike is quite nice – the trail is well built and we are walking along the coast so we have some nice views of the sea. There is a jungle canopy walk – basically a bunch of walkways / rope bridges hung up in the trees – that you can do a bit inland and we had purchased some tickets for that before we started out (this is the only thing that costs money in the whole park). We start to head inland to the canopy walk and the terrain starts to get a bit more rugged and the quality of the trail starts to drop off a bit, still quite good, but a noticeable change from the costal trail.

The canopy walk is about 5 or 6 sections of overhead bridges that criss-cross the jungle about 60 feet above the jungle floor. The walk is interesting, but given the zip-line adventures we have done it pales a bit in comparison. We are not disappointed as the tickets were not at all expensive, and it was something we have not done before so worth the stop.

Back to the jungle floor we start the real part of our hike, up and over a ridge and onward to the beach on the other side. It is here however that the trail deteriorates even further and is really just a path at best now. We have about 3km to go through the jungle and the vertical rise is about 400 meters so this is now becoming a fairly serious workout. Of course there is no breeze in the jungle, and no cold drink stations, so I am now measuring my progress in pints of sweat per meter traveled!

After about an hour we get to a point where the trail converges with another trail so we know we are not fully lost, and shortly after that we reach the summit of the ridge, so it is now mostly all downhill from here. This is a good thing because I am not sure how Mrs. Columbus would have carried me out of the jungle without her sherpa gear to carry me on!

The trail down the backside of the ridge to the beach is no great shakes either, but it is downhill so as long as you watch your footing it is a lot less exertion. Of course to add insult to injury at one point we spot a local guy who is jogging the trail up from the beach!?!

We finally make it to the beach and it is actually quite nice here – many of the beaches on Penang are quite coarse sand or rocky so this one is a nice surprise. The beach is called Turtle Beach because supposedly this is where the sea turtles come to lay their eggs, but in addition to the lack of other people around there is no sign of any turtles here either. We decide to just sit on the beach and take in the tranquility until 6pm when our boat is supposed to meet us for the return trip to the park entrance.

6pm soon comes and goes, and by about 6:30 Mrs. Columbus and I are starting to look at each other with that ‘now what’ look, as we know that the trip back through the jungle will take longer than the sun is going to be around for and the trail would be a disaster in the pitch black. We are just coming to the conclusion that being stranded on the beach will be better than lost in the jungle when we see a boat coming in from the distance.  It turns out that Malaysians are often late (we are informed of this by another Malaysian), and this is indeed our boat, but the driver had a chance to take another customer to another beach so he is running behind.

Rescued from being castaways, Mrs. Columbus and I no longer have to worry about eating coconuts and making grass skirts, and we can enjoy the nice boat ride back to the pier. After the hike we are really tired, and I am ready for a nap, but we need to wait for the bus to go back to town, so we sit down at a street-side restaurant for dinner while we wait. We get back to our room sometime after 9pm and it is the end of another long but enjoyable day.

We are down to the last part of our vacation and have moved on from Thailand to Malaysia.  This is our first time here, and while we won’t have enough time to see a lot of the country we are hopping to get a bit of a taste of a couple areas so that we can decide what to see more of next time we come back.

It was mostly a long travel day today, we left Chiang Mai in the morning on a direct flight to Kuala Lumpur, and then after a couple hour layover we took the short hop back up the west coast of Malaysia to Penang.

We were a little nervous about our change of planes in Kuala Lumpur because we had to clear customs first and gather all our bags etc, and initially we thought that we only had an hour for the change, but the plane was a little early, and there was some confusion about the flight time, so we made it to the gate with a bit of time to spare.

After getting checked into the hotel, Mrs. Columbus has done some fact gathering from the hotel staff on things to do and how to get around so we decide to venture out this evening to try the local bus and a trip up to the Penang Hill Station.

The bus system works pretty good here, they are inexpensive, fairly modern and run with a high frequency, so taking the bus up to the hill station actually works out pretty good. The system seems to work much better than the Thai system, but that probably explains why there are no tuk-tuks, songthaews, etc. here.

Between the wait for the bus, and the trip itself through the rush hour traffic we unfortunately make it to the hill station too late to catch the sunset, but we are here now, and the view of the city at night is supposed to be fairly impressive, so we get onto the Penang Hill Railroad funicular railroad (a train that goes up a track on about a 50 degree angle).

The trip up the railroad takes about 15 minutes to go up the 850 meters to the top, and it is quite an impressive ride. We end up at the top after the sun has set and the place is pretty quiet as most things at the top have closed for the night. We are however rewarded with some nice views of the city at night, but even at night there is still a bit of haze over the city, so the photos are not all that sharp.

After about an hour we take the train back down the hill and hop on the bus for the trip back to downtown.  It has been a long day with all the travel, and we are exhausted by the time we get back to our hotel. A good night’s sleep is now the order of the day.