Jan 31 – Feb 5, 2011: No, not that Georgetown, the pricey western section of Washington D.C. This one, established just three decades later and named for a different King George, was Singapore before Singapore was founded – Britain’s key entrepot in southeast Asia, on the island of Penang. It’s off the coast of northwest Malaysia, a short ferry-boat ride from Butterworth, where you can catch the train to Singapore – or to Bangkok.
Visiting Malaysia in 2002 I passed up Georgetown in favor of five days resting a bad foot on the idyllic island of Perhentian Besar. But I kept reading good reports about the town, and I really wanted to ride that night train to Bangkok. Since I only wanted to ride the train one way, to get there I took a cheap Air Asia flight from Bangkok’s new airport, Suvarnabhumi.
While the new airport is bigger and glitzier than the old, I was unimpressed. Ads for free wifi got my hopes up, but then it turned out you only got 15 minutes, and for that you needed a password from the Information Center. When I flew to Georgetown, no passwords were available. But, far worse, the lines to clear passport control, arriving or departing, are unbelievable. The waiting room is huge, but it always seems to be crammed full of people.
I was spending Chinese New Year in Georgetown and had been lucky to get a cheap rate at the Cititel Hotel via agoda.com, as the hotel’s website was asking three times the usual rack rate. So I was a little antsy as my taxi from Penang airport got stuck in traffic, as I figured I would be the first to be bumped if the hotel was overbooked. My driver did his best, detouring onto narrow side streets, but they were as solidly jammed as the main roads.
Happily, I had no problems checking in, and appreciated my comfortable room, and the view of the colonial era Eastern and Oriental Hotel, and of the sea beyond. The mezzanine bar was a good place to check out my fellow guests, as it overlooked the long lobby. Sipping Cointreau (probably local Cointreau, given the price, but it tasted fine), I watched family after family parade through, gathering on the couches or heading for the elevators. Large, multi-generational families, in town for the New Year holiday, with impressively well-behaved children, fashionable teens, sedate parents and stooped grandmothers.
I enjoyed afternoon tea at the too-expensive-for-me E and O (not bad, but not up to the Raffles), and when on my last two nights the bars near the pricier hotel were playing music so loud I could feel the vibrations in my room, I was glad not to be staying there. Actually, if I had been going to splurge, I’d probably have picked the nearby Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, a recently restored historic house that’s also a tourist attraction.
Between them the E and O and the Mansion exemplified historic Georgetown: graceful colonial buildings around a green expanse leading to the remains of the citadel, and lavish Chinese mansions among the shop houses on the main streets. I visited one of the mansions, and the Koongsi clan house, and some of the elaborate Chinese temples, but by this time I was getting seriously tired of sightseeing in heat and humidity. I was dreaming of a trip to Scandinavia, and I spent a fair amount of my time in Georgetown chilling out in air-conditioned malls. I found a local chain of coffee shops, Georgetown White Coffee, with free wifi and OK food. My hotel was charging a ridiculous price for wifi, and for a not very good breakfast – I ate breakfast a couple of blocks away at a small and charming place run by a family.
Once again I was disappointed by a meal at a well-reviewed restaurant – Nonya and Baba Cuisine. It had featured in an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”, but I much preferred Hot Wok round the corner. It looked like an undistinguished strip mall restaurant, but the food and service were excellent, even though it was Chinese New Year and a big party was eating in the back room. I would go back just for another serving of the petai shrimp. Other nights I ate quite well at Journey Through India, close to my hotel.
So, about that train ride. I rode the ferry back to the main land, located the train station, and sat down next to the air-conditioner in the waiting room, eager to settle into a comfortable berth for the ride back to Bangkok. Then I was approached by a man wanting to sell me a bus ticket. A bus ticket?
Yes, a bus ticket. The train had been canceled!!! The only explanation I got from the unhelpful woman in the ticket office was that it had been running too late to make it back to the Thai border before it closed. I suspect that there had been too few reservations. In any case, no train to the border. I bought the bus ticket.
When the little group of stranded passengers trekked over to the bus station we found that the seller had marked the tickets up, but I didn’t begrudge him the 10 ringgit – I figured he deserved it both for enterprise, and for saving me the hassle of trying to buy a ticket myself in the hot, chaotic bus station. And it was, as usual in Malaysia, a very comfortable bus. It just wasn’t a train.
After we cleared immigration at the Thai border, and finally arrived at Hat Yai, the half dozen backpackers headed for the train station, where we were able to buy tickets for the train that we should have ridden from Butterworth (since I already had a ticket I got a refund on the unused section). I had ridden this stretch of track before, my “Train Ride From Hell” in third class, at least this time I had comfort and privacy in a second class berth. But the train from Butterworth is still on my “things to do ” list.
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