Day 101 - Overnight Train to Bangkok

I booked an overnight sleeper train from Butterworth (Penang) to Bangkok. The entire journey would take around 21 hours, due mostly to the long stops at each station heading north.

I was awoken at night in the hostel to firecrackers, probably signaling the start of Aidilfitri for the Muslim community in the city.

In the morning, I took a ferry across the island of Penang to Butterworth. The ferry took around 10 minutes and was free for people leaving the island. You only have to pay when you take the ferry in the other direction.

There was very little activity across Malaysia due to the holiday. When I boarded the train at around 2PM, I was told that we wouldn't be able to find any food until we reached Thailand around 7PM since most of the restarants were closed and the food vendors were probably celebrating the holiday.

The train was not very clean, but I liked the way it was easily converted from seats during the day to wide (the bottom bed) and comfortable beds at night! It was a fun experience to sleep on the train, while the movement rocked me to sleep

Butterworth Train Station

Ferry from Georgetown to Butterworth

My train to Bangkok

Cozy Sleepers

Day 100 – Food and Tour of Georgetown, Penang

Knowing that I would only get one day to explore Penang meant that I would have to try as much food here as I could, which was my main objective, with exploration of the city taking a backseat.

I ended up arriving in the city of Georgetown at 6am, way too early to check into the hostel I booked, but I ended up taking a taxi there anyways in hopes of seeing if I could just nap in the lobby. The doors were locked and no one was around, but luckily, after a couple of minutes of waiting outside, one of the staff came by to open the door and let me sleep in the staff room.

There were informative guides on the popular Penang cuisine at the hostel that I used to find some of the local delicacies. Check out the pictures below to see what I ate.

The city of Georgetown, like Malacca, is a UNESCO world heritage site. Malaysia is a fairly new country, so these two UNESCO sites were very different compared to other places I'd visited in South East Asia. The other sites had been thousands of years old, but here, the buildings are relatively newer, maybe only at the most, a couple hundred years old. Again, most of the “old city” was walkable, and I ventured around using a handy tourist map that I saw every other tourist hold as they also walked around the city. Since today was the day before Aidilfitri, many of the sites were closed and we had to resort to walking by, snapping a quick picture, and then heading to the next stop without really knowing what exactly was the significance of each stop.

Fried Oysters

Cendal

Fort Cornwallis

Guan Yin Temple