Cameron Highlands + Penang

Photo: Dog bench at Kek Lok Si temple on Penang

I’m wrapping up the last 3 days of Malaysia today! The next stop is Thailand - starting with Bangkok.

After KL, I took the bus to a region called Cameron Highlands. It’s extremely popular inside of Malaysia as a day trip. The region is at a mild elevation of about 5,000 feet, so the temperatures are much milder and more pleasant. It’s famous for its tea fields (though, the tea being sold wasn’t very high-quality), and it was beautiful! I arrived in the early afternoon and checked into my hostel. This hostel was fairly social, but I didn’t make any new friends yet. I just grabbed some dinner at a local Indian place and took a short walk on a local trail to see a disappointing waterfall. At that point, I was feeling somewhat lonely. It’s even more lonely to be surrounded by potential friends than it is to be alone.

Not all was lost, though :). The next morning, I signed up to go on a group hike with others from the hostel. This was such a good idea! The hike left at 9 a.m. and was estimated to take around 4 hours. I was only staying in Cameron Highlands for the night, so I had a bus out scheduled for 14:30 - plenty of time for my hike (foreshadowing). The hike started with some difficult jungle terrain. I was having a blast; the people I was hiking with were so friendly, and we were making lots of quips. The trail transitioned into what was effectively a farmer’s access road, and later into a path through the middle of a tea field. The views were really incredible, and the weather was so nice!

About an hour into the hike, I got a call from the driver who was going to drive me from Cameron Highlands to Penang, my next stop. He asked if we could push up the pickup time to 13:30 to avoid some traffic. I obliged, thinking that I would have plenty of time after the hike was over to grab my backpack and get to the pickup spot. What I didn’t anticipate was how difficult it would be to get from the end of the trail back to the hostel. The only way back was to walk for an hour or hitchhike for the 10-minute drive. We (the hostel group) figured hitchhiking would be easy. But it turned out to be super difficult. Nobody wanted to pick us up! I’m sure it didn’t help that, apparently, Malaysians aren’t familiar with the hitchhiking thumb symbol. A very kind local lady informed us of that and joined us in attempting to flag a car down.

Eventually, the only Uber (the local version is called Grab) driver in the whole town accepted our request, and we got a ride back. I made it with some time to spare, but it was definitely close. And rather than being stressful, I found the whole experience fun and exciting; I would say it was the highlight of my trip so far. I think it’s fun to experience those kinds of mild hurdles with other people.

The van trip to George Town on Penang Island (in the appropriately named state of Penang) was uneventful. I checked into my small homestay hotel, and headed out to dinner. It turned out that there was a hawker centre with several Michelin-recommended stalls just around the corner - how serendipitous ;). The food there was AMAZING.

The next day, I spent a couple of hours wasting away in the hotel, recovering from some mild sunburn, before exploring the downtown of George Town. I don’t have much to say about George Town other than it was simply very nice. The town itself had a lot of character and history. The food was great. What more do you need?

One interesting part was the “Clan Jetties” on the waterfront, pictures of which you can see in my insta post below. Penang has a large Chinese immigrant population, and some families settled on these stilt houses over the water. The jetties were beautiful and actively lived-in. Pretty cool!

The next day, I took a trip to Penang Hill. The hill had a nice view of George Town and the rest of Penang. To get to the top involved a ride on a Swiss-made funicular - that was pretty cool. I made a new friend on the way to the top. He was an Indian guy working in the city of Ipoh as a chef, taking a day trip on his day off. We got along well, and he recommended that I check out the nearby Kek Lok Si temple. So I did!

The Kek Lok Si temple was a really cool Buddhist temple with a huge (99 ft) bronze statue of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. Apparently, the Kek Lok Si temple is the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. You could see the statue of Guanyin from very far away on Penang Hill. Cool stuff.

That evening, I had some Michelin-recommended Hokkien Prawn Mee at the hawker centre, which was the best meal I’ve had yet. (That’s the last photo in the post above.) Worth every stain on my shirt :).

George Town and the Cameron Highlands were definitely my favorite parts of Malaysia, and I’m sad to leave. While I may not come back to Malaysia on this trip, I’m definitely not finished with the country. The people here are SUPER friendly, and there are so many places I missed. Not just on the mainland peninsula, but I’ve heard good things about the island of Borneo.