Penang through Polaroids

Well hello. You are probably wondering if we dropped off the face of the earth and/or why our posts are so jumbled lately, but I can assure you, we are very much alive and kickin' and have  too many photos to put them in a sequential order. So, you get a mix-mash of photos and places for now, but we promise to be more linear in the future! As for now we have some updating for you.

From the Cameron Highlands, we headed to Malaysia's west coast to check out the colonial island town of of Georgetown, on Penang. Penang once existed as an important trading destination for China and the Middle East, long before we were given Hong-Kong or Singapore,  and it has all the culture infusion that Malaysia is famous for. We stayed at a beautifully restored old Peranakan mansion turned hostel located on Love Lane, which curiously acquired the name because it was the road where wealthy Chinese businessmen kept their mistresses. So after checking in, we did what we do best and searched out the flavors of the city. Conveniently, Love Lane is only a few blocks from Little India, so we immediately found more banana-leaf lunches and relished the wonderful-ness that is Indian food.  Penang on a whole is slightly uninteresting and extremely hot, so we managed to squeeze in a few movies and mainly hung around Little India.  If you have never tried a banana-leaf lunch, or South-Indian sweets, I highly recommend you track some down, the flavors will change your life, although I warn you, you will from then on regard turkey sandwiches with disgust.

After a few days of sweating in Penang, we had to get to the water, so we ferried it to the popular island destination of Pulau Langkwai. Langkawi has a beautiful wide stretch of white-sand beach, which we happily camped out on while watching people take their lives in their hands while paragliding behind boats, but more on that later, this posts is looking more like a novel than a blurb!