The last two days we've taken a couple hikes in the Cameron Highlands. I'm sore as hell, and can barely move. A good time to catch up with the journal here . . . First off, what we did in Penang:

We stayed for about 4 days in Georgetown. From reading travel websites, a lot of people seem to not like the place, but we thought it was a lot of fun.

We stayed on Love Lane, in Chinatown. The central city of Georgetown is a really fascinating place. The bulk of the buildings are 19th or early 20th century Chinese shophouses, in varying states of decay. There are a number of shophouses remaining in Bangkok's Chinatown, and I think we've seen the odd survivor in California gold-rush towns (Dad, confirm?), but nowhere else have we seen so many in one place.

In the future, I can imagine Georgetown's inner city gentrifying and filling up with expensive restaurants, US$200-a-night "boutique hotels", and tacky souvenier shops -- a sort of Southeast Asian New Orleans. For now though, the inner city is being benevolently neglected, and life goes on there, much as it has for the last 200 years or so.

The food was great and cheap. The Indian food, especially, was good. Much better than in India. We ended up eating tons of dosas (or "tosais" in Malaysia) and South Indian thalis (set meals). Traditionally, South Indian thalis are served on a banana leaf, rather than on a plate. Strangely, we never had our food served on a banana leaf in India, except for at one tourist-oriented restaurant. But in Georgetown, every Indian meal we ate was on a banana leaf.

Trying new foods is very easy here. English is almost universally understood, at least among Chinese and Indians in the cities. And since Malay is written in roman script, if you have a food guide, you can puzzle out menus pretty easily. Penang is known throughout Malaysia and Singapore as the food mecca of the peninsula, so if you spend all your time sitting around in backpacker cafes that serve second-rate Western food, you're really missing out on what's special about the place.

A couple of mornings we spent on city "heritage walks." There's a heritage conservation group in Georgetown (which I can't remember the name of) that publishes brochures for self-guiding tours around the main sights of Central Georgetown. These brochures take you to the most interesting of the British colonial buildings, Chinese shophouses and clan houses, and temples, mosques, and churches in town. It's really, really hot in Georgetown, so what should have been a half-day walk ended up getting stretched out over about three days!

The highlight of Georgetown was the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion. This was one of many homes of one of 19th century Asia's richest men. Most wealthy Chinese of the time were building their mansions in a European style. Cheong made the somewhat eccentric decision to build his home in an anachronistic style, as a traditional Chinese courtyard house. The tour of the house was great. The guide explained the feng shui principles on which the house was layed out, as well as the symbolic meanings of the various decorative motifs in the house.

Outside of Georgetown, we visited the Kek Lok See temple, a huge, colorful Chinese temple complex in the hills. The highlight is the giant bronze statue of the goddess of mercy, Guanyin, which can only be reached by "Malaysia's first air-conditioned diagonal lift." Supposedly, it's the biggest Guanyin statue in the world. (On a side note, Malaysians are obsessed with world records. Everything in the country seems to be the biggest/first/fastest/tallest in Malaysia/Asia/the world/the universe.) There are also numerous shrines and prayer halls with statues of various buddhas, bodhisattvas, saints, heavenly guardians, and Chinese deities. Cathy didn't really like the place because she thought it was tacky and vulgar. I loved it, because it was tacky and vulgar.