Penang 2

We enjoyed Penang so much that we're both doing an entry.

I was shocked when Bec chose to stay in the cesspit, it hummed so much it overpowered my BO, but then realised she was exhausted and couldn't take finding somewhere else after a long journey. After we saw the ugliest ladyboy prozzies and rats as big as monkeys(!) she somehow had an energy surge. When I went had to nip out and buy some water from our new hotel and encountered the prostitutes again I wasn't sure whether they were touting for business or trying to recruit me!

Penang is an island on the NW coast of Malaysia and was a colony before Singapore so there's plenty of British history, but I couldn't persuade Bec to come to the museum (she wouldn't go in Phnom Penh either until she'd finished watching Bridget Jones). The new buidlings are equally impressive and here's a random roundabout with a fountain.

We visited a tropical fruit farm and naturally I had to take a pic of Bec next to a cactus so that I could type - "Here's a prickly object and a cactus!" (She's sitting next to me as I type - suddenly the monkeys don't seem as scary). There were all sorts of exotic fruits to discover - starapples, pomelo, durien, yellow watermelons, mangostine, jackfruit, rammutan (literally hairy balls) dragonfruit and did you know that a banana tree only has one yield of one bunch of bananas and that's all; the tree has be chopped down and another grows in its place. There was an Arab family going round with us and the guide kept asking if we knew the names of fruits as we approached them - the young Arab girl said about one fruit"Oh, I know this one, it's an applepine!"

The Eastern and Oriental hotel where we had the Malay buffet is a 19th Century hotel and previous guests have included Kipling (Rudyard not Mr), Somerset Maughan and Graham Greene. We kept up the high class of guest ; )