The Penang Hill

It was good to be back in Penang eight months after my first visit there sometime last year.George Town seemed to have undergone quite a bit of extensive re-painting, giving new looks to most parts of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.Don’t you just love Penang?It was love at first sight when I came to Penang the first time and my love for Penang had not changed a bit when I went there again – although this time I only had half a day to indulge into whatever I could fit into those limited hours  before I flew back to KL on the same day.I took the opportunity to visit Penang Hill – something that I didn’t get to do on that first visit because it was still close for refurbishment works back then. It had actually dragged on for too long that the people of Penang were beginning to get really angry at the authority for keeping one of their favorite places for weekend getaways close for too long.It was all over the news and was actually beginning to get something of a political issue – what more that Penang is now in the hands of the opposition party.

Being finally there for the first time, I could see why the people of Penang were angry. Penang Hill really is a perfect place to bring a whole comrade of family to for a little break away from the hustle and bustle of the city.I was quite surprised to see how expensive the ticket was. RM 8 per entry for the locals and RM30 for international tourists – It was one of those times when I was glad I was a Malaysian. I imagined how if places like Eiffel Tower and The Louvre Museum in Paris impose tourist rate to its international tourists. There’s no way I could have afforded it. But of course you can always come back when you’re over 55. You’ll be entitled to 50% discount – if you’ll ever make it to that old. LOL The best part of Penang Hill is probably to get up to the top which requires its visitors to get on a train that slides up at 45 degree. It was quite of an adrenaline rush.And boy, despite the ascend, I really thought it moves way faster than our tortoise commuter in KL.Being one of the most visited places in Penang, you’d have to expect each carriage to be crowded and the very limited number of seats doesn’t help much in giving everybody’s ass a comfortable space to sit on.But then, the ride only takes about 2-3 minutes so standing up all throughout the ride wouldn’t really kill you.Of course people don’t really come to Penang Hill just for the ride itself but more on the view that it offers from there.If you want to see how big the city of Penang is, go to Penang Hill. You’d be surprised to see how George Town is only a small fraction of the whole city which is fast becoming a metropolitan.You can even see the whole stretch of Penang Bridge and even as far as its other end which is of course the Butterworth – the less visited part of Penang.Penang Hill has a long history of being a posh residential area for the rich in the past. Now that it is rightfully back in the hands of Penang council, it is still very much livable actually, thanks to the presence of a Police station, a Clinic and even a post office! (wha..t?)A little bit more of ascent had brought me to a beautiful temple that stood magnificently on top of the hill.They seemed to be preparing for some kind of celebration so I didn’t really want to bother them with my witty (and sometimes stupid) acts. LOL!Just a spit’s throw away from the temple is a mosque. You see, whoever says that a mosque and a temple cannot be built close to each other is a paranoid moron and Penang Hill speaks that out for me. I don’t think God buys the idea of territorial discrimination in the world that He himself had created.I keep telling everybody that one of the biggest failures of our education system is the failure in instilling the much needed awareness against littering in every citizen’s head – at least to the level that we can be proud of.If reinforcement was being fully-implemented as it should be, Penang Hill would have been gaining more profit from the littering fines than the entrance fees. Seriously, rubbish seems to be strewn so freely around I wondered what the cops were doing when they seem to have a mansion for a station.Oh, how come I forgot. Cops don’t buy the idea of #Bersih.Apart from the temple and probably the beautiful view that it offers, there’s really nothing much to see up the Penang Hill. If you like to see birds being caged and denied freedom to fly free, there’s a small bird park there for you but I’m afraid you’d have to fish out another 5 bucks to gain entry to it.Despite being quite small in size, I was actually quite surprised to see how many of the birds I had never seen anywhere else before.Some of them were so colorful I had to keep convincing myself that there was nothing artificial about their appearance and that they were ‘Born This Way’. Heh.I wondered if whoever managed the park actually realized how the BRC was ‘eating up’ on the bird beaks. With absolutely nothing else the birds could do to get through another boring day or at least to the next feeding time, it was no surprise that the birds would subject themselves to injuring themselves by gnawing at the BRC, probably as a means of protest that they are being caged and denied freedom of living a normal life like most other creatures out there do.You know how every now and then prisoners would kill themselves in the prison not because they feel guilty for the crimes they have committed but simply because they could not put up with the boredom of being confined. The idea of being confined for years on end alone kills their souls.OK, maybe I’m being a bit too much on this but I just felt that if they couldn’t set the birds free (otherwise I wouldn’t have seen those rare birds), they should at least make sure that the cages don’t jeopardize any part of their physical beings.Ohh, and the mini bird park is not all about birds actually. There are other things to see and I was most fascinated to see this.And they have quite a collection of pitcher plants. You know how pitcher plants were considered rare back in those days when people had to get deep into the jungle to see one. Here at Penang Hill, I could even touch ’em. If one day is not enough for you to take in everything that Penang Hill has to offer to you, you can actually choose to stay overnight there. There is a hotel called Bellevue although it looked more like an office block than a hotel to me. LOL!And if you’re too lazy to move around within that small accessible compound of Penang Hill, you can choose to hop on to one of their mini jeeps. I didn’t ask the price but I did hear somebody mention something like RM40 per ride. Shared among 4 persons, it will come down to RM10 per person I guess.So – Penang Hill is definitely a place to visit when you come down to Penang anytime soon. As for me, I can always say…I was there. 😀

Check out more pictures of Penang >> here