Penang: The Real McCoy

Penang’s a tiny island, but full of things to see and do. It’s got good beaches and shopping, but what really turns us on is culture and history, so that’s what this journal is going to be all about. And Penang, believe me, has loads to offer the most avid of culture vultures.

The island’s colourful past means that there are very strong traces of British and Chinese history. The Chinese were (and still are) among Penang’s most prominent communities, and all the way from the striking indigo-hued mansion of the Chinese tycoon Cheong Fatt Tze to the clan house of Khoo Kongsi and the temples of Kwan Yin and Yap Kong See, there’s a distinctly Chinese flavour to Penang. Not Chinese, but definitely Oriental, is the Buddhist temple of Wat Chayamangkalaram and the Burmese wat of Dhammikarma opposite it.

Undoubtedly antipodal, however, is the British colonial aspect of Penang- Fort Cornwallis, now ruined but very evocative; the Penang Museum; and the many old mansions lining Lebuh Light. All of it contributes to a very heady mix of East and West, and we at least fell completely in love with it.

Check out more in my journal The Chinese side of Penang.

Quick Tips:

Penang’s manageably small, and if you plan well in advance what you want to see, you should be able to do much or all of your sightseeing and shopping (if you’re keen on picking up local souvenirs, that is) in a couple of days. The best thing about Penang is that much of the local population around knows English, so it’s easy to make yourself understood. And if you have problems in deciding what to see, where to go, and stuff like that, you can always go to the tourist office in KOMTAR (Kompleks Tun Abdul Razak), a large shopping mall in the heart of Georgetown. We found the staff very helpful.

Like almost everywhere else in the Far East, in Penang too, there are two things you’ve got to keep in mind as soon as you arrive. Firstly, bargain over anything. It’s expected, and if you don’t bargain, you might get fleeced left, right, and centre. Secondly, steer clear of touts. There aren’t as many of them as there are in cities like Bangkok, but they’re there anyway, and if you’re not careful, they’ll sweet-talk you into spending all your hard-earned money over stuff that could’ve come close to free.

Best Way To Get Around:

Penang’s transport system, as far as we saw it, extended to taxis, trishaws, and the most time-tested of all: our own two feet. The city’s really too small to have an underground -- in fact, we didn’t even notice any buses! The taxis are there, though -- and they often don’t have meters, so you’ve got to haggle with the cabbie and decide on the fare before you begin the trip. The other alternative is trishaws -- cheaper, more exotic, slower, and good for two thin people (my husband and I had a very uncomfortable ride in a very narrow trishaw!). Watch out for the trishaw drivers, though: ours told us he’d take us on a one-hour ride through town, showing us x, y and z, for 30 ringgit. He spent something like three hours showing us the town and then demanded 90 ringgit. So.

Fortunately enough, the town’s best sights are not that far apart, so if you like walking and have a good pair of legs, I’d suggest you pack your sneakers when you go to Penang. It’s more convenient, and you get to see the town at close quarters.

Getting cheap accommodation was high up on our list of priorities, though we weren’t willing to settle for a hovel -- and, as it turned out, the YMCA International Hostel was the perfect place to stay. Quiet, comfortable, clean, and very affordable. As in other YMCAs across South East Asia, here too there were no luxuries, but the place was worth every sen we spent on it. Jalan Macalister, on which the YMCA’s located, is a very quiet (really! -- hardly any traffic here) road, tree-lined and pretty. The YMCA’s a functional, no-frills white building, with its own gym, conference room, library, badminton and squash courts, laundry and restaurant. The staff at the reception is friendly and helpful -- we got lots of inside information on Penang from them -- but the restaurant (it’s called Café 747) is a rather dingy place with tacky paper cutouts of airplanes stuck on the walls -- highly avoidable. The food -- a mix of Chinese, Malay and `Western’ (sandwiches and the like) -- is all right, but the staff are frightfully surly and most uninterested in serving you; besides which, the menu’s overpriced.

Café 747’s shortcomings didn’t bother us much, as we found a nice place to eat across the road (more on this later). And anyway, our room at the YMCA more than made up for it. An air-conditioned double room (which cost us RM67 a night), it had wide windows overlooking a pretty park filled with orange, flowering, flamboyant trees. The room was spacious, and had a TV, an electric kettle, running hot and cold water in the attached bathroom. Very comfortable and clean, although the corridor outside was a trifle too dark and daily evening jive-and-ballroom classes in the gym downstairs made it a noisy place to be in.

Despite all that: the YMCA’s a good place to stay; and what’s better, reservations can be made online (which is what we did), by sending an e-mail to YMCA Penang.

We’d been staying at the YMCA International Hostel on Jalan Macalister and a single meal at the local restaurant inspired us to go looking for greener -- and cheaper and friendlier -- pastures. A short walk brought us to a very bare-bones eatery called the Jasmine Garden Café, also on Jalan Macalister (just across the YMCA, in fact). The Jasmine Garden Café is housed on the ground floor of the Wisma Katolik Building, in what looks a bit like a parking area; it has walls on only two sides -- the other two sides have pillars and look out on a quiet garden. The café’s one of those really functional eateries with very plain furniture and the only attempt at decoration are a few tatty prints on the walls.

What’s good about the Jasmine Garden Café is that the staff is very friendly and efficient, and the food’s both good and affordable. The menu’s limited -- you can ask for the special of the day and they’ll tell you -- but it’s invariably well made. We ate dinner here on two consecutive days and really enjoyed our meals: an excellent mixed fried rice, chicken in plum sauce (and a crispy-skinned chicken in mango sauce the next day), and a glass each of fresh apple juice. The portions were big enough to satisfy two fairly hungry people and the best thing was the bill -- it came to just about RM17! And what was even more surprising was that the waitress refused to accept a tip -- she actually insisted on giving us back each sen of the change!

The Penang Museum is housed in a lovely old building which was once the Penang Free School (it dates back partly to 1896, partly to 1906: and the building, anyway, is only half there - the rest of it was bombed into oblivion during World War II). The museum is home to a large and impressive collection of artefacts relating to the island, its history, and its many races. We visited it on a somewhat rushed afternoon, and so weren’t able to devote as much time to it as we would have liked to, but did manage to get a look at part of the collection. Among the museum’s best sections are the ones on old paintings, photographs, and an assortment of articles relating to Penang’s ethnic communities - the Chinese (including a section on the kongsi, or clanhouses, of the Chinese), the Malays, the Indians, Eurasians, British (there’s a large section on the East India Company), the Japanese, and more. And yes, the items on display are not just boring old paintings and photographs - there’s plenty more.

Among the many, many articles on display are trishaws, jinrickshaws, hawker’s stalls, costumes, jewellery, weapons, photographs, utensils, dioramas and models, furniture (plenty of beautiful dark wood chests and chairs, inlaid with exquisite mother-of-pearl, and even opium beds - on which Chinese opium addicts would loll about smoking away to glory). Every ethnic community is represented; there’s a large section on Nyonyas-Babas (the Straits Chinese), their costumes, customs and weddings (including plenty of wedding photographs, dowry chests, a gorgeously bedecked wedding bed, and samples of exquisite Nyonya embroidery and beadwork).

Other highlights: a replica of the will made by Francis Light, the Englishman who claimed Penang for the Crown and founded Georgetown; ceramics, opium pipes, betel-nut sets and spittoons; a recreation of an old tuck-shop and a traditional room in a Chinese home; Japanese weaponry from World War II; and so on. On the whole, a neat snapshot - in fairly great detail - of Penang, its history and evolution, and its multicultural composition. There’s a computer screen too, on which you can see more details about the museum and Penang, but some of it was still under construction when we visited.

Admission to the Penang Museum is free.

All our guidebooks recommended Wat Chayamangkalaram - and it wasn’t too far from where we were staying, so we decided to take a walk and check it out. Wat Chayamangkalaram is a Thai Buddhist temple which is home to one of the largest reclining Buddhas in the world. It was built on a piece of land especially donated by the British Crown in 1845, by the then Governor of Penang, Butterworth.

The temple, a traditional Thai shrine, is typical of Thai architecture - elegantly soaring, curved roofs, lots of gold paint, and plenty of ornamentation. It’s all pretty flamboyant - gold paint covers much of the building - and the inside is in the form of a long, high hall, in which the statue of the Buddha lies on its side. The Reclining Buddha is big, but that’s about it. Personally, I found it rather unattractive - the white paint on it looks like fresh emulsion. Beneath and behind the Reclining Buddha are hundreds of small recesses in the wall, each containing a ceramic urn filled with the ashes of a devotee - whose photo is pasted in front of the urn. More than a wee bit spooky.

All around, on the walls of the temple, are paintings depicting scenes from mythology; above them, the entire wall is covered with a three-dimensional pattern with tiny golden Buddhas seated in the centre of each pattern.

All in all, I didn’t like Wat Chayamangkalaram that much - it’s not as beautiful as what lies opposite, at any rate. Across the road is a temple which definitely beats this one as far as beauty’s concerned - it’s the Burmese Buddhist Temple of Dhammikarma - truly stunning. A golden spire soars up on one side; and prettily curving, ornately carved golden roofs top the temple. Inside, a tall golden Buddha towers benevolently over the quiet hall, the inside of which is richly decorated with heavily carved and polished teak and gold - quite spectacular. The combined effect, of gold and teak, is rich, yet not gaudy. This is one place I’d recommend seeing, even though it isn’t as famous as Wat Chayamangkalaram.

Penang, say the guidebooks, is the Pearl of the Orient. Never mind that the tourist boards of every other city (or country, for that matter) east of the Suez say the same -- Hong Kong, Philippines, Goa, Sri Lanka. But this is the real McCoy. Penang, exotica at its best. Chinese, Malay, Brit; colourful, effervescent, immensely likeable.

Our arrival at Penang didn’t really endear us to the city: we got off, puffy-eyed and exhausted, from the Kuala Lumpur train at 6am at the distinctly seedy port town of Butterworth, where a sharp-eyed taxi driver volunteered the information that the next ferry to Penang would leave after an hour and a half, and ferry tickets would cost us 47 ringgit -- whereas he could get us to Penang in 57 ringgit. Just 10 ringgit more, and in comfort -- and right now, too. Our guardian angel must’ve given us a silent warning because we decided to ask someone else too, and learned from a local railway official that the ferry would in fact be leaving in 15 minutes and cost just 30 sens a ticket.

To discover that we’d narrowly escaped being duped well and proper was hardly a good start to the two-day stopover we were planning at Penang. Surprisingly enough, though, Penang turned out to be the high point of our vacation. We had already seen glittery, fun-filled Singapore, with its spanking clean streets, its delightful Jurong Bird Park and its Night Safari; we had been on the somewhat weather-beaten rides at the amusement park at Genting Highlands; and we would be going on to Bangkok, ultimate in exotica. . . but Penang, even now, remains the best part of that trip. Vivid, delightful, and straight out of the pages of a history book, Penang will probably always be one of my favourite cities in the Far East- all that greenery, the grass verge, the palms and the bilimbi trees beside the road- and of course the fabulously historic aura which envelops so much of Penang. The very Indian colour of Little India; the irresistibly Oriental charm of Khoo Kongsi and the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion; and of course the very colonial feel of so many parts of Georgetown. Just driving down Lebuh Light on our way from the YMCA to the ferry terminal brought that back to me very forcibly -- so much of Lebuh Light is lined with pretty houses (almost mansions, really) -- with white columns, gravel driveways, pretty lawns with conifers framing the gate, tiled roofs and tall windows -- so many of those buildings actually look as if they belong in an 18th- or 19th-century English novel rather than a green island in the tropics! Anyway, all part of the irresistible charm of Penang.

Penang, or Pulau Pinang, as it’s known in Malay, is the island; its main town and capital is Georgetown. Captain Francis Light, who named it after King George III, established Georgetown sometime in the 1780s mainly as a trading centre for the East India Company. A major trading and mercantile centre, Penang attracted thousands of people- Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, Armenians, Javanese, Japanese, Europeans, Indonesians and apparently anybody else who happened to be in the vicinity -- and all of them came and settled here. The city, till today, retains a very eclectic feel and is much more exotic, interesting and old-fashioned than, say, Kuala Lumpur. Chinatown is delightfully Chinese (more so, I think, than Singapore’s); Little India is really very Indian and the area around Fort Cornwallis is amazingly colonial -- even the streets here have beautifully Brit names: Jalan Farquhar (Farquhar was an associate of Lights’), Lebuh Light, Lebuh Cannon, Jalan Argyll, Jalan Scotland, Jalan Hutton, Lebuh Kimberley, Lebuh Carnarvon, and Jalan Magazine. . . delightful!

The buildings, too, with their colonnaded facades, their elegant columns, curving balconies, verandahs and wooden shutter-windows look straight out of The Jewel in the Crown. Many, like the lovely white St George’s Church and the white clock tower (near Fort Cornwallis and built to commemorate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign, although it was completed only in 1902, after she was dead) are really striking. Incidentally, in this list too it’s worth adding the lovely white-and-dark-blue Customs department building; the blue police department building; the HSBC building (HSBC, in fact, set up shop here more than a century ago -- a truly historic bank. Their building’s a yellowish-white one, quite nice) and plenty of other old colonial edifices, nearly all in very good shape.

We spent only two days in Penang and then we caught the ferry back to Butterworth, from where we were to board the train north to Bangkok. Everybody back home had told us how colourful Bangkok was, how vibrant and vivid, but we at least were sorry to be leaving Penang. The fact that we’d narrowly escaped being swindled on the way to Penang was forgotten. All we remembered was the smiling face of the stewardess who returned the tip, saying, "You’ve forgotten your money"; the sight of the bright orange flowers on the tree outside the YMCA; the serene face of the golden Buddha in the Burmese wat of Dhammikarma. The kindly guide, clad in a mauve skirt and jacket, her hair tied in a tiny pigtail with a minute gold ribbon, who took us around the Cheong Fatt tze mansion; the impressive Penang Museum; the breeze blowing along Jalan Macalister as we walked along it to the town center. . . yes, Penang is it. The real McCoy, the true Pearl of the Orient.