One week left

This one is post dated: Aug 8th

That title is for mom, since she is leaving on the 16th and that day will be all travel.
We've seen a lot though in the 3+weeks she's been here.

Since the last post we landed in Penang, checked it out, and came down to Pulau Pangkor for one last beach trip. We spent all day today laying out on the beach, and I'm red enough to prove it!

We arrived here on Pangkor after a day of travel yesterday only to be greeted by a dingy small room and hordes of locals here for the weekend. Let's say I was less than pleased even though the beach was pretty nice. It was a little hard to appreciate it with people tearing around on JetSkis and screaming jilbab'd women in the water. Nonetheless, we hung out on the beach for quite a while hoping for a sunset, but mostly because we didn't want to go back to our dingy little room.
What a difference a day makes though! This morning we packed up our bags because the very helpful owner of Seagull Resort agreed to move us to a nice room and charge us the same cheap price since there had been a mis-communication (I didn't knowingly book us into the ultra-budget place). The night before they had been too full to move us, but they were nice enough to let us switch. The morning also got off to a good start because we slept in later than we had the whole trip and were greeted by a whole tree full of green doves and hornbills! The morning also greeted us with some good weather which held out for our entire beach day. The Coral Beach we were camped out at was completely different without all the local tourists around. There were a few in the morning, but by the afternoon the place was pretty sedate and beautiful; pretty nice even for a spoiled beach snob like me!

Before Pangkor we spent two pretty full days in Penang. Having flown directly from Kota Kinabalu, we took a bus into Georgetown (the old historic area on the island) and walked to our hostel, which was a little eclectic, and had some THIN walls, but certainly served its purpose well.
The next day we got up and literally saw about the ENTIRE historic district! Needless to say that was a little much for one day! I was a little surprised by the historic area because it was still a big, busy city (not necessarily such a good thing!), but I was impressed with Penang due to its diversity. On one block I saw a mosque, followed by a Chinese (huge influence there) Buddhist temple, followed by an Indian food restaurant, a British\colonial style building and a Hindu temple. The Boon San Tong Khoo Kongsi temple was the only one we paid to enter, but was far and away better than any other we saw. The wood carvings and the general decoration as well as the information was impressive. Another good temple was the (something) Teow temple. I also had never seen anything like the clan jetties: basically Chinese houses built out over the water organized by the various clans the families belonged to.

The next day, feeling a little overwhelmed, we started a little later and instead left the city proper. But that wasn't until after going to check out Fort Cornwallis, the starting point for the British on the island. The fort was about as I expected: not a whole lot, but I was glad to have gone in and seen it nonetheless. It's kind of weird in that the city now seems to use the place as a event location.
After that we spent the day on public transport, first heading up into the ritzy part of the island and eventually got to the National Park in the NW corner of the island. Having spent the last 5 or 6 days in the city both of us, but particularly mom (who is still WAY overwhelmed by the crazy absurdness that is SE Asian cities), were glad to get out into some peace and quiet for some walking around.
Our next goal was to get to a very spectacular looking temple outside of Georgetown that we'd seen pictures of lit up at night when it looked even more spectacular. We didn't however look at any fine print and thus missed that the place closed at 5:30pm! Oh well we got to see another part of the city!

All right time to go for (hopefully) a sunset and a 'mom-treat' for dinner