Having visited most of the city's main tourist spots the day
before, the one feather in our cap we were missing was a tour at the "Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion". I know, sounds
exciting. Colleen and I showed up at
said mansion for the lunchtime tour expecting there to be a handful of
people. Instead, we were greeted by a
group of over 100 people. It just goes
to show the power that Lonely Planet travel
guides have and how if they decide you are one of the "top ten mansions in the world" the masses will follow.
The tour itself was pretty unspectacular, as we had one tour guide for
the entire group trying to yell over everyone with no microphone or voice
amplification system. Colleen and I both
lost interest pretty quickly and before we knew it we were wandering off from
the tour group and taking silly pictures in an attempt to entertain
ourselves. Eventually even this got too
tedious and we decided to just walk out on the tour. Problem solved.
 |
| All it takes is a Lonely Planet recommendation and BOOM! your boring attraction is a hit. |
 |
| Let's just take selfies instead. |
 |
| Clearly I was loving the tour. My eyes say it all. |
Free from the mansion, we headed back to our hotel to
attempt to map out the next day's travel plans (but not before we stopped off at...Subway of course). Our plan was to head back to Koh Tao (the
diving island) in Thailand as Colleen really wanted to get in some more diving
before heading to Canada the following week.
Due to the Chinese New Year, all of the flights and more desirable
travel arrangements were sold out or out of our price range so we headed down
the street to the local travel agency.
While the shop had some very attractive prices in their windows, inside
I was greeted by possibly the ugliest he-she (see: transsexual, ladyboy, etc) I
had ever seen. In the last couple of
months I had seen my fair share of men who now "identified"
themselves as women, and to be honest some of them weren't that bad
looking. I mean shit, you pump enough
drinks in to someone and it's not surprising that you are constantly hearing
stories of foreign men who pick up "women" at the bar and take them
home only to discover that they are packing some taped up heat in their thongs. Anyways, no amount of drinks was going to
make this boy pretty, but at least he,
or should I say she, found us a good deal
for the next day. For $55 each we would
have to take a 4 hour ride in a minibus (large van), followed by an 8 hour
overnight bus ride, and then finally a 2.5 hour ferry ride before arriving in
Koh Tao. Not exactly ideal, but hey it
would get us there.
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| A final addition to our collection of pictures of Penang's spectacular street art. |
In preparation for our big journey the next day, we spent
our last and third consecutive night at the Red
Garden Food Paradise. It was pouring
rain all night so we took refuge there and just enjoyed the good, cheap food
and beer. To top it off, we got the best
service we had had in Malaysia at the only place that wasn't charging an
automatic service charge. Hell, the guy
sweeping the floors even stopped to fill my beer glass for me! Now that's service.
I spent my last night in Malaysia watching
"Armageddon" back in the hotel room, a sure sign of what the next day was going to feel like with all of
the less-than-first-class-travelling that awaited us.
~Brentski~
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