A note: After years, blogger is still not mobile friendly for posting. I guess they don’t care.
Moving on: we touched down at Penang International Airport approximately 12.55pm.
Our initial plan was to head to Tanjong Bungah for the floating mosque and then to Batu Feringghi for the night market.
We had landed in the middle of Thaipusam celebrations. And it’s a great deal. A lot more of a deal than we had expected.
We were advised by the hotel concierge that Batu Feringghi was not a good idea at all. So, a change of plans.
We set about exploring the nearby shops from our hotel instead.
More on that post-trip.
Post Trip:
Goodbye Blogger, hello WordPress.
If you are reading this, this travel blog is no longer on the antiquated, mobile unfriendly platform.
Enough of my ranting, so here’s what we did on the first day.
As we checked in for our flight, dark clouds began to roll in. It drizzled briefly before we took off.
We booked our flight on Airasia, a Malaysia-owned budget carrier. I might be one of the very few people who enjoy airline food, and Airasia, in my opinion, has one of the best. (OK, to be honest I’ve only tried Airasia and Jetstar for budget carriers. In my defence, I have tried normal airline food. Some are quite awful. )
Previously, I had the fried rice with satay. While the meal I ordered, Satay wrap, was not bad, it was not what I expected at all.
Penang International Airport is small comparative to Singapore Changi Airport. Once the airplane moved to the gate, the passengers disembarked onto the tarmac and climbed up the stairs.
No photographs here, but Penang International Airport consists of a fair bit of “bridges”. We could see the transit area as we walked to get our passports stamped.
There’s free hourly wifi (You can reconnect again after your free hour has expired) in that requires you to just click on the agree button. Decent speed.
Before the passport stamping area, the visitor may purchase prepaid sim cards from 3 major Malaysian telcos (sorry can’t remember which, but Digi might be one of them). They’re side by side booths. You won’t miss them.
On exit, the driver that we pre-booked via AirAsiaGo received us with a sign card bearing my name. It was a small van (not a hotel bus as AirAsiaGo described, you know, the sort that drops people off at various hotels before returning to airport to pick up more passengers) and it was exclusive to us.
There was a traffic jam, that doubled our journey time to the hotel. On the way, we caught glimpses of the famous (original) Penang Bridge.
It was a sight to behold!
The hotel we stayed was Bayview Hotel Georgetown Penang, located almost at the heart of Georgetown.
If we had more time, we could have probably walked to a lot more attractions, seeing how the attractions were practically littered around us.
(Hover over the images to view the captions)
Look at the room decor above, and now look at this:
I don’t know what they were thinking when they put this in the room. Truly.
While we initially had wanted to go to the far-reaching places such as Batu Feringghi and Tanjung Bungah, the road situation made it fairly impossible. While waiting for a cab which we had sort of “booked” for 3.30pm, we had our late lunch. We couldn’t wait, since we had reached nearly 3pm from the airport.
We ended up cancelling the cab (not that the original driver turned up anyway), and decided to go on a walk see around our hotel instead. (By around, I meant a walk down the nearest road, Leith Street, straight to Komtar).
When we exited the hotel, we were stunned by the weather. It was seriously seriously HOT. But we soldiered on.
We earmarked the Chocolate Boutique and Blue Mansion for a day visit, and went shopping at the shophouses. We stopped by Mydin, a hypermarket with really cheap stuff which we did not buy.
Other places we hit was the Chowrasta market (outer part) to get a magnet (killed two birds with one stone. Hah!), the Line Clear Nasi Kandar (when we dropped by later to pack dinner, there wasn’t anything much left. Boo.), and chendol (prefer Singapore chendol instead).
Komtar is essentially a dead town. But they had a lot of bags, long skirts and cheap shirts. The department store was letting go of clothes for like RM40 or something. Really really cheap stuff. A must go if you want cheap clothes, but nothing much there.
(Hover over the photos below to view the captions)
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