Three views of Penang

We got up reasonably early today (given we'd lain awake watching the execrable Stripes on TV last night until I don't know when) and got a taxi over to Penang Hill, where the funicular took us up to the top.

It's a long way up: so much so that when the train paused at the middle station, I thought we were done. It was only recently installed by a Swiss company, and feels safe, unlike the first incarnation, built using slave labour and shoddy British engineering, and which was broken as soon as it began and had to be replaced over the next three years. Never get colonised, that teaches us.

Apres le deluge

Yesterday we signed up for a trip to the Klias Wetlands to see some monkeys. I hadn't realised that this would require an interminable trip in a coach all the way there, surrounded by Chinese tourists who needed to be prodded into giving up any space on the coach for us to sit down. The scenery, to begin with quite interesting and a change from Hong Kong, gradually turned into just a whole lot of palm trees and rice paddies, until I passed out asleep from boredom, and awoke half an hour later to find we were still travelling through the endless greenness, only occasionally punctuated by a brown river.