a: Flying to Penang.

For the agreed price of Rm 90, the taxi driver took us to the KL International airport to catch our Air Asia flight to Penang. Then we found out that Air Asia has its own terminal building a few miles further away. So back in our taxi to get there and I gave him an extra RM10 for the unintended detour. Much later I found out that there is actually a high-speed train connection from this Air Asia airport to KLCentral in downtown KL, the central traffic hub.   And Air Asia also offers a low-cost bus service from their terminal to KL for RM 9. For an additional RM 9, they will drop you off or pick you up from your hotel. You just have to know these things.

To make things interesting, there are also three Light Rail systems, run by three different companies, who don’t believe in cooperating with each other.

Air Asia, a burgeoning budget airline has a modern fleet, the youngest in Asia at that time. We found out it is good practice to check on their fares if you have to fly in Asia. Because sometimes they have specials with ridiculously low prices. When I was looking at fares, Air Asia had a special discounted fare that day for the KL - Penang segment for the unbelievable price of RM 2.50 per person. KL-Penang is about 200 miles and RM 2.50 is about $0.75. It sounded unreal, but I booked the ticket anyway, because I certainly could afford to lose $0.75. But it was quite legitimate. But with airport taxes and fees the total was around US$10 per person. We paid more than that just for the taxi fare from town.

The Air Asia terminal in KL was just a huge hangar with bare walls, no fancy accoutrements or expensive architectural decor or furniture. Cold air was blasting everywhere from their air conditioning units. As we came inside, lightly dressed and all sweaty from the outside heat, it was pleasant for a few minutes, but then the cold air soon chilled us to the bone. And all our other clothing were in our checked luggage. I managed to pick up a humongous cold waiting for the plane to leave. 

Everything else was spartan to the extreme; no porters, no staff to steer you to the right counter, no information booth, it appears.  And because of the low fares, they only give a luggage allowance of 15 kg/per person. Which means that about everyone had to pay excess baggage fees, which was a considerable source of income for the airline. We had to pay RM 56 for the excess 7 kgs of our luggage.

In the waiting room we met a charming young lady named Tan Siew Ming from Penang, who offered to take us along from Penang airport to our hotel in the car of her girl-friend who was going to pick her up. We gratefully accepted her offer. We didn’t know what the girlfriend was going to think.

b: The Cheong Fatt Tze mansion.

It was still a long drive from the airport to our hotel, crossing the long bridge connecting the mainland to Penang island, where our destination was located; the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion in George Town. It is also one of the most unusual hotels in town with a lot of interesting history.

left: Facade of the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion in Penang. The building is also known as La Maison Blue.

right: A cool interior corridor of the mansion. In the back one can see a decorative spiral staircase leading to the second floor. The windows are of the bedrooms.

When he became rich as a merchant-entrepreneur, he built this opulent mansion at the turn of the 19th century. It was called “La Maison Blue”, a flamboyant masterpiece of 38 rooms, 5 courtyards, 7 staircases and 220 windows in the typical 19th century Straits Settlement style architecture.

There are Gothic louvered windows, Chinese cut and paste porcelain work, Stoke-on-Trent floor tiles, Scottish cast iron implements for the balustrades, and art nouveau type stained glass windows. The color of the mansion is very distinctively blue, obtained by mixing lime with the natural blue dye of the indigo plant. The walls of the mansion are covered with this lime wash; lime is very effective in the humid tropics, because it absorbs moisture and cools the house.

left: Detail of one of the many porcelain artwork on the walls. A piece has fallen off the red figure just left of center. Each petal of the flowers is a shard of porcelain.

.To preserve this jewel of a house, so that it would not be divided, Cheong Fatt Tze put the house and its contents in a trust, stipulating that it could not be sold until the last of his “official” sons died.

The center courtyard was the heart of the house and the source of “Chih” for the house. There are 4 pairs of columns surrounding the courtyard, under which gold coins have been placed to ensure prosperity.

right: Main courtyard of mansion

left: Bamboo still life in the mansion.

Breakfast was in an open building adjacent to the central courtyard. As befitting a place in Penang, breakfast was very good and varied, even though it has strong Western overtones. Most of the guests were taking things easy and were unhurried. This is not a commercial hotel, where you come just to sleep and bolt down your breakfast, but you are reliving a piece of history, a museum, and a very unusual place. The big treat was a historical tour of the mansion by Mrs. Loh herself. That was free; the three other tours during the day require admission fees and are led by a member of the staff.

One afternoon we ordered a one-hour massage for each of us. Two Indonesian women in their early thirties came and gave each of us an invigorating massage in tandem for which the charge was RM 85/person. For Penang that was quite expensive. But it appears that only a small pittance go to these women; most of the money goes to the pimp. The women are not much more than his indentured servants. This man recruited them in Indonesia, promising them a good job, arranged passage on a boat from Indonesia to Penang (journey of three days from Indonesia), gets them their papers, and supplies them with food and lodgings. In return these women have to work very hard every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are also forced into prostitution. Anyway, it will take them years to pay off their debt, because the pimp also demands the tips from his women.

There is of course more to see in Penang than just this mansion.

There is an Indian temple with very elaborate decorations on the outside, depicting many Hindu gods. Very colorful and charming, but quite standard for Hindu Temples in the Far East.

right: Hindu Temple in Penang

left: Street scene in George Town, Penang. The houses are still colonial-style.

c: Food in Penang

How is the food. Good. I will probably never make a living writing about food, because I only have a rudimentary perception on how chefs create their masterpieces, notwithstanding watching countless episodes of the Iron Chef and the inimitable Jacque Pepin. Those are my wife’s favorite shows. So my taste is unschooled subjective. Which is just fine, I suppose.

The good cuisine here is the regional cuisine.  You can get it from restaurants, in the evening outdoor hawker’s markets, in little roadside hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop eating stalls, and in the food courts in the shopping malls. This is food for the masses, not only for the privileged few.  Penang food is a little bit on the spicy side, which is just as well, because it will help preserve the food and reduce the chances of getting food poisoning, something we have to be aware of as tourists. Why the food is so good is because here they know how to use the right combination and amount of the many spices available.

Our first foray into food in Penang was to have dinner at the hawker’s market adjacent to Cheong Fatt Tze. Huge expectations; mediocre results. And over the days we were in Penang we did try the regional cuisine in the various venues, with mixed results, but the average was definitely still a B+ to  A-. The best place we visited was Mama Restaurant, 31-D Abu Siti Lane, 10400, Penang, an establishment serving Njonja food. We had fish stomach soup, a delicately flavored shrimp curry, a sautéed vegetable dish, and some otak-otak, which is steamed fish paste in a flavorful pandan leaf, all for around $18. Excellent food. That was an A+

Njonja is Mrs in Malay/Indonesian. In the old days “njonja” was also the mistress of the house. If she was of Chinese descent, she would probably be middle-class and she would cook both Chinese and the local Malaysian/Indonesian dishes. This developed into the Njonja cuisine, a beautiful and tasty culinary blend of these two different cultures. But if the “njonja” was caucasian, she was upper-class and she would certainly not bother to cook, because she would have enough servants to take care of this onerous task. This was colonialism country, after all. So there was no major group of housewives trying to blend “Zuurkool en Worst” (Dutch for sauerkraut and sausage) or steak and kidney pie with the local cuisine of the domestic staff.

Eric, the manager of Cheong Fatt Tze, offered to take us and a few other guests for dinner. He didn’t want to say where, just that it would be very good.  That was very kind of him and so we accepted his offer with the proviso that he would be our guest instead. After all, the salary of a manager is not very much, and he had invited a total of 6, the two of us and a family of four from Sydney.  Where did he take us to?. Surprise!!. Mama Restaurant, of course, where the food was wonderfully good and guaranteed to clog your arteries if you keep eating it for six months. 

right: Main entree at the “Opera”. The folded green banana leaf package contains the perfumed steamed rice. The fish is in the pandan leaves in the middle. There is a lightly dressed salad, and there are pickled vegetables and there is another dish on the side.

In one evening we took a taxi to the Little India area for dinner at Sri. Here they serve Indian food, using Indian spices and Indian cooks. The food was good, but Norma, my wife, thinks it is was not better than the Indian food we get in Berkeley, California. The picture below may surprise you, because you would be expecting something posh. But Little India is almost like a hole-in-the-wall take-out place.

left:  Little India is a simple restaurant. Most of the eating places in Penang are simple and directed towards the average inhabitant.

Missing from this list are the top-end restaurants. No we didn’t go and eat at any of them. I don’t even know where they are in Penang. I have the feeling that in these high-end places the emphasis is on presentation and international flavor and less on adventure. You’ll often find the same stuff in other expensive restaurants all over the world.

You note that we were using taxis to get around. It is just too hot to walk or to take public transportation. Cheong Fatt Tze will get a taxi for you, who will charge you a flat rate of RM 8 for a trip to anywhere in town. And the same rate to pick you up anywhere in town and bring you back to the hotel. But the fare to the airport from our hotel was RM 38.

d: Pulau Pinang or Penang Island.

When I speak of Penang, I actually mean George Town on the island of Penang, which is part of the State of Penang. This island is on the West Coast of the Malaysian Peninsula, in the Straits of Malacca. At one time it was named Prince of Wales Island, when it was occupied by the British East India Company in 1786. It is about 8 miles wide, and about 12 miles long, from north to south.

George Town itself is on the Eastern shores of this island, facing Butterworth on the mainland over a narrow strait of water. To get to the mainland, where the airport is located, you have to cross the 8.4 mile long Penang Bridge. This toll bridge, also called Jambatan Pulau Pinang, was opened in 1985 and it is the longest bridge in Malaysia. It is a matter of considerable pride to Penang, that the bridge was designed by a local engineer. Toll for cars are RM 7.00. Before the bridge was constructed you had to take a ferry to get to the island, which was a time-consuming affair.

So we took a half-day tour of the island. Our first stop was the Snake Temple, in Bayan Lepas south of George Town.

As we entered the smoky temple we saw snakes everywhere; on the chairs, hanging over branches of plants in the temple, and in other unexpected places. Many of them are venomous pit vipers and they all look asleep, presumably being so rendered by the pervasive smoke of incense burning everywhere. However, there are warnings everywhere not to pick them up.

right and below: These bamboo “snake-racks” allow the snakes to settle comfortably in the surroundings.

These are poisonous green vipers. Note the brown discarded skin of a snake in the middle of the rattan structures.

The trilingual sign in Malaysian, English, and Chinese warns the visitors not to touch the snakes. If you do, it is at your own risk.

The temple is adjacent to a forest and the snakes are said to come from this forest into the temple on their own accord. Or maybe also because food, such as eggs, are provided for them. The caretakers tell us that the snake population has dwindled considerably over the years, because encroaching civilization has reduced the size of the forest behind the temple. 

Behind the temple is now a commercial snake farm. The owner showed us a 7 meter long python and other smaller pythons.

right: A 7-meter long python taking his afternoon siesta.

There were a great variety of other snakes in glass terrariums, most of them venomous. Well, if you need some snake venom, this is a good place to get it.

left: A bucolic stream next to the road.

The town was busy, because it was Sunday and there was a market going. A few miles further north we came to Kampung Sungai Pinang, a typical Malay village, where the houses are built on wooden poles, which are inserted in concrete blocks in the ground. The guide tells us that the population used to move often, probably because of the crops, and this way they can move the whole house easily from one place to another.

right:. A row of fishing boats at anchor at the Pekan Teluk Bahang harbor.

Close by there was a small batik factory, where local artisans were working on placing the patterns on the batik cloth, which can be cotton, silk, or rayon. The pattern is first printed in wax on the cloth and the color is then applied by hand in the empty areas. The wax pattern prevents the color from running. You will find this activity all over South-East Asia.

From there going northwest along the coast took us to Batu Feringgi, the coastal resort area in the north of the island. There are many vacation condos there, because the beach is nice with good sand on them and big boulders in between.

We skipped the pewter factory. Pewter is big here, because there are a lot of places where tin is mined. So the driver drove us back to George Town and dropped us off at the Prangin Mall in downtown, where we had lunch in the food court on the 5th floor. I can’t remember what we had and how it tasted.  It could not have been very good or bad; we would have remembered.

left: In the Prangin Mall.

Prangin Mall is huge, noisy, and easy to get lost in.  It is the largest shopping mall in Penang. The lower floors are populated by those huge faceless forgettable international department stores, but the higher floors are more interesting. Here you can find the local stores selling local stuff. On the other hand, shopping malls are now ubiquitous appendages in large cities. After a while most of them look the same. I am obviously a failed shopoholic.