Penang [Joshua Burke]

Penang 

Sea Glass is now anchored off Penang Island, Malaysia and we will be here for a couple days before moving up to Langkawi where we will be there for a couple days. Lots of stuff to do in town and we rented a car (which had nice air conditioning) and saw some local tourist attractions. When driving around town make sure to look out for people driving on motorcycles because they weave in and out of cars and cut in front of you. A lot of the people here are of Indian descent because the British brought them over as laborers. 

We drove to the edge of town where we took a steep tram to the top of the outlaying mountains. Up at the top the air was nice and cool with a bonus of a good look of the city. We could even see our boat from here, (a small white dot in the distance). In the British period wealthy British built these large mansions on the mountains, and when the Malaysians got their independence all of the British people moved away but kept the buildings standing. Now Millionaire Malaysians own the mansions (they call them bungalows) and have them as holiday houses. There are 44 on the island, but only 14 are accessible by road. I saw about six when we were taking a motorized guided tour.

The city (the other side in Peninsular Malaysia) 

Me and Jacob on the tram.

There was also a museum about Owls, which was very interesting. They had over 1000 different owl art pieces in their collection. My favorite piece was a huge painting of a close-up view of an owl eye.

The "eye"

Me with owl paintings

During the day we also went to the largest Buddhist temple I have ever seen. There was a man-made lake filled to the brim with turtles and lots of Buddhist deity statues. Since it was later in the day we didn’t get to see the large Buddha statue, which was kind of disappointing.

Some of the turtles.

Us under the arch

The large Buddhist temple.

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Joshua