malaysia - penang

i spent about 3 months in singapore before heading to australia. my dad and jade took me on a long weekend to malaysia. we decided to go to penang, which is an island northwest of peninsular malaysia and connected to the mainland by the penang bridge. other ways to get to the rest of malaysia is by ferry or airplane. we arrived at the capital of the island, georgetown, somewhere in the morning and spent the first day walking around exploring the city. armed with an incredibly touristy map, sunglasses and our camera's, we visited many temples, famous buildings, crowdy markets and tasted true penang food. the population is very varied with the majority being ethnic chinese, making penang the only state in malaysia where ethnic chinese forms a plurality. the official religion in malaysia is islam, but in penang the mosques are definitely outnumbered by temples.

buddhist temple, mosque and city hall

campbell street which is mostly chinese, the blue mansion, clanjetties

traditional penang laksa, the outside of popiah, springrolls guy

tossing noodles, guy cooking food and who was too busy to even notice me taking photos, chendol a sort of lemonade with gooey thingies in it

guy filleting fish, sunday market, veggies

pickled fruit, dried fish, goat heads, you gotta love asian markets

guys plaing checkers with beer caps, nightshot, outside food court

there are two places on penang you must absolutely visit: the butterfly farm and the tropical spice garden. of course we couldn't explore the entire island, since we only had 5 days, but these were really worth going to. after trying to get a bus we just took a cab to these places, since they were both on the other side of the island.

penang butterfly farm is the world's first tropical butterfly sanctuary and inside are about 4000 butterflies from 120 species. signs explain the life cycle and there are also some other interesting creatures crawling around:

lifecycle: egg, caterpillar, butterfly

butterflies on a pineapple slice, giant millipedes (that's their actual name), fluorescent scorpions

bunch of walking leaves, two iguanas

little alligator snapper, pignosed turtle, horseshoe crab

at the spice garden we took a tour with a guide who explained everything we had around us and after that we had a cooking class with nazlina, using spices from the garden itself and learning how to use them. we made spicy chicken with a salad and tomato rice which was absolutely yummy (the recipe can be found on her website). Underneath some pictures of the tools and ingredients we used and some pretty areas in the garden. The only bad thing about the garden though is the never ending clouds of mosquitoes!! The staff is so nice to give everybody free anti mosquito stuff at the entrance.


A couple more places we saw were the snake temple (with actual poisonous snakes), kek lok si temple (which means temple of supreme bliss) and one with a massive statue of a sleeping buddha.