Up and Around

[Monday Oct 15th]
Today's Adventure? Up the Northern Coast of the Island, through Batu Ferringhi, up around the North West corner, and back around circumnavigating the Island.

Our first stop was was Batu Ferringhi. Its a big tourist destination here on Penang. There are several hotels/resorts along the beach. On the beach there a are a bunch of operators with Jet-Ski, ATV, and Horse rentals. They also have parasailing. We opted out of these. I've seen a few too many parasailing crashes on the beach, and we all know how I faired the last time I had a parachute strapped to me ;) BTW, this is the place where they have the Batu Ferringhi night market, that's the 1km long market that we strolled through last week.

We pushed onward and made it to the Butterfly Park. This park is great. Its an enclosed area, like an aviary. There are thousands of butterflies just flying about. Tons of different species. When we first got there a bunch really mist have liked Anna's pink shirt. They swarmed her. After the first little bit though, they left her alone. They had several paths go go down and just be with the butterflies. There were little stand out where they had placed fruit or flowers for food for the butterflies. Seeing so many was just staggering.

Butterflies weren't the only things they had there. They had a pit of scorpions. They sure look ugly and nasty in person. Stay clear of these guys. They has some huge millipedes, nearly a foot long, yeech, no thanks! There was a big lizard, he was pretty cool. It was basically a big Iguana. He was right near the exotic bugs.

They had a few plants sitting out, you could walk right up and touch them if you wanted. They had them out because you could have a close encounter with some the the strangest bugs on the planet. These huge bugs have adapted to conceal themselves. Some as leaves, some as sticks, sum and I don't even know what. They're hard to spot at first because they are so well concealed. After you see them you don't know how you could have missed them. They are huge!

They had a pond, a waterfall, a bunch of overgrown Koi, and some ducks too. Now the ducks were amazingly beautiful. They were Mandarin Ducks, related to the Woodland Ducks of North American. These ducks has do much color, looked very ornate. Wisconsin should get some ;)

After or Butterfly tour, we headed to Taman Negara. Thats the national park on Penang, with the Trail to Monek Beach (remember the Monkey in the Coconut Mask?). We strolled around there, and walked out onto the Docks.

We hit the road and drove through the back country around the Western side of the Island. Most of the driver is through the mountains, winding narrow roads with great views. Very little of that part of the Island is inhabited.

Grandpa, you'll like this story ;) Near the end of our journey, we thought we'd take a detour and try and find an old fishing village. One of the old villages on stilts. We saw a green sign with Yellow lettering and thought that maybe it'd lead us there. Silly us. After about 20 minutes, getting off the main road. The road getting narrower. Parts of the road washed out, falling down to the sea below. There were a lot of 'AWAS' signs. Awas means Caution in Malay... We couldn't read the rest so we had no idea what to be cautious about. So we just kept going, naturally ;) I joked that we were probably on a road to some secret military base... We came to the end of the road. It was a gated end too. We stopped. At first we turned around but then we went back to see what we had discovered. I walked up to and through the gate. My glasses were fully fogged. I could hardly see. Before I knew it I was standing within a few feet of 3 guys just sitting around. I asked where we were and they were baffled. "What do you mean" they said. I said, "are we at a town, a village, what?". "You want town?" they asked. "No, we want to know where we are." He said a training facility... Hmm I though, what kind? So I asked. He said a Military training facility. With that, we left. It was just like several times with Grandpa, we'd drive up to a military base, such as Fort Knox, with the motor home. We'd get let in past the gates because we couldn't turn around and got to go in the base ;)

We made it back around the island and back to the apartment. No Military escort required ;)