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.