Penang Malaysia, Here I Come

I am about to go to Penang Malaysia in the next few days, for a few days. It is the first south east Asia trip to an area I have never been before. One of the great things about being in Phuket is the accessibility to regional travel right for here, without having to go and fly out of Bangkok every time you want to leave Thailand. So I will fly on an airline called Firefly, which has almost daily direct flights of about one hour duration and very low cost. I could have also gotten to Penang from other carriers, but they all involved flights one or two hours south of Penang, a lay-over for a few hours, and then to Penang. You could spend the better part of a day to get to what is a one hour destination. I know it is a low cost, no frills flight, but it is one hour in the air, and I have no idea on the comforts and amenities, but I do know whatever it is or is not, beats sitting around airport terminals waiting for connecting flights.

It is surprising how many airlines actually fly direct to Phuket from many places. You can fly Phuket direct to and from Melbourne, Brisbane, Hong Kong, Seoul, Berlin, Brussels, Taipei, among many others. Something that when you come to visit here, you may well not know about.


I have done some research and know there are some sights I surely want to see. I also have a friend living there so I am sure he will want to show off some of the highlights too. Lucky for me he is an avid photographer, so this will be a good chance to do one of my favorite things; take photo's! Another friend has already recommended the Cameron Highlands to go picking strawberries and for some tea.  I am really looking forward to is to go to the botanical gardens, which has among the collections a spice garden, where I can see cinnamon, nutmeg and other spices growing instead of dried and ground up in a glass jar.  I have been busy downloading app's for my iTouch, and have language app's, sightseeing app's, bridge cam app's and most importantly, apparently, the listing for street hawkers food carts and descriptions of the food they sell. This is apparently an integral part of Penang. I see on some sights they say people actually travel to Penang just to go to these carts.
It is also a good opportunity to do some scouting, as the Penang marathon is on in November, and Clive wants to run that. 

So not much activity here for the next week. But I am sure to have something to say and pictures to show of my first venture into Malaysia.