Sweet Summer Travel Experiences to Recapture (Part 2)

Apart from the trip to Gold Coast, I’m happy to recapture one of my previous local trips to Penang also.

• A Trip To Penang, Malaysia
  • What a shame if you talk about a Malaysian and has been 6 years never travelled to Penang, “Wa Lao eh”! After realizing that next year’s “Visit Malaysia Year 2007” is for the 50th year of Malaysia, and there are so many tourist spot in Malaysia that I haven’t visited for so long or never visit before, I decided to make a trip up to Penang for a 3 days 2 nights stay!

    

    From my past traveling experience, I tried booking a hotel on-line. My target staying spot is along Batu Ferringhi beach, where some of our foreign friends described it as the second Bali Kuda Beach. While searching for hotels in that area, to my surprise, there are so many new hotels came up during the last few years, like Shangri-La Rasa Sayang Resort & Spa, Ferringhi Beach Hotel, Park Royal, Golden Sand, Bayview and many more.
    Some of them do have on-line booking service. After reviewing them all, I decided to go for Casuarina Resort, sea-view suite with all sorts of facilities, and of-course, “Harga Berpatutan”. We reserved a 2 nights stay from 18th to 19th August 2006.

    Then I hook up the line again and search for all the latest hot spot in the island. For more information, TurismPenang website is a good start. It explains all aspects of Penang, from his history background, place to visit, to stay, food to things to buy. With the route map planned out, we are ready to go!

  • For this trip, my wife and I decided to have a more relax environment, unlike the trip we had to Gold Coast, Australia where we controlled our budget along the trip. We drove up from K.L. with our baby car, Honda City, bought a year ago. I think it’s a good choice as you cannot find another car in the Malaysian market where you can have both fuel economy and power with its little 1500cc Vtec engine and CVT gearbox (I will explain these in my other post, watch out for this).

    We drove up along PLUS highway in a sunny afternoon with all sorts of tit-bits stocked in the cabin. Eat and Sleep all the way (off course dropped also few grams of water in the middle). After a few hours drive, we felt hungry and stopped at Bukit Tambun.

    Bukit Tambun is a riverside village not far away from Butterworth where you could find many of those cheap and nice seafood restaurant. We ordered clams, prawns, crabs and organic vegetable for our late lunch at 3.00pm. What a catch! You know how much it cost us, only RM 135.00 !! Right after the hefty meal we had, we lazily continued our journey and 20 minutes later, Penang Bridge is right in front of us and here we come, the beautiful island!
  • Though heavy traffic jam happened over the Penang Bridge, we were kind of relieved, and excited…….., when we discovered the fresh air and the clear blue sky in Penang that we missed so much.

    Why? It’s been few weeks, during the period, our K.L. citizens were facing terrible “Haze” and dust in the air when monsoon wind blew all the burnt dust from Indonesia burnt rain forest into our land. The visibility of out K.L. city once reached a record low of horrible 1.5 KM!!!! Imagine you could not see a thing or car or building, everything beyond that distance!!!

    In fact, one of the reasons we decided to escaped to Penang for a couple of days is to avoid the “Haze” in K.L. which already caused us feeling really uncomfortable and sick, felt like couldn’t breathe at all. Luckily and finally, we could once again, see the clear blue sky, sunshine, though is hot, is not stuffy.

  • We talked about Haze, we talked about traffic jam (But don’t make me wrong, I enjoyed every decision that I have made, right or wrong), now let’s talk about the fun part of our trip.

    We reached Penang Island at about 5 in the afternoon. With the clear indication of the traffic sign board, we drove all the way, passing through Bukit Bendera, George Town, Pulau Tikus, Gurney Drive, Burma Beach (don’t worry, I will bring you to all these places in future) and finally reached Batu Ferringhi in about 30minutes time. “Is it so near?” No. “Is it so fast?” Yes. Because of the straight forward roads in Penang and not much traffic jam in town. “Did you pay toll fees to use the motorway?” Oh No! The most interesting part of the roads here in Penang is, YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY TOLL. Instead in our K.L. town, toll plazas are everywhere and you know what, we pay toll fees for traffic jam in the motorway!

  • Batu Ferringhi Beach is in the northern part of Penang Island. Stretching over 2km, its coastline is curvy, covered with rocks at some area and fine sand with deep beaches at other area. It’s quite recessed from the George Town, having separated between them the other beach, Burma Beach, which is in Northern East of the island and Gurney Drive. If you are from Gurney Drive, you will need to drive along the seaside city road and all the way heading to Batu Ferringhi. It’s just so straight forward.

    You don’t have to worry about “Missing IN Action” as landmarks are everywhere: all you could notice along the way is Resorts, Hotels and Apartments. In fact over 50% of Penang accomodation for tourists are located here. It’s a real “Wow” factor, as I’m the Construction Manager by profession in the real estate industry, high rise buildings has been constructed all over the place since six years ago when I was here, mostly apartments, because of the scarcity of land, along the beach in this Island. New luxury condominium in the area is fetching a fairly high price here with contemporary design, sea view balcony, full height windows, high tech building automation and so on.

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.