Ipoh

We could certainly have spent more time in Penang, but I had been recommended to the Cameron Highlands - cool, they said, with tea plantations, so since it was on our way back to KL, we headed off by ferry and bus.

Personally I prefer trains to buses, and train stations to bus stations. However, Liz' navigational skills and instincts for the way things work got us to the bus depot in the mainland part of Penang - the ferry between the island and the mainland was free!

According to the guidebook there were cheaper bus fare to be had, but no-one I found was in a haggling mood. Nor particularly was I & it is hard to care cantankerously about less than $1. The number of people involved in the fare was fairly large - the shill, the man who wrote out the ticket and took the money, the person who had to be spoken to to confirm the existence of vacant seats, the person who took the tickets, the bus driver, and the sleeping bus driver. 6 people, to split my 12 ringgits - to say nothing of the petrol & maintenance costs. There were maybe 20 people on the bus, which makes three rounds trips a day between Ipoh & Penang. I guess, multiplying it all out, that's 120 ringgits a day each on average (assuming no costs). Actually that's OK - they could spend about 1/3 of it on overhead and it is a reasonable business. I don't know what rents are like if you are local, but you can certainly eat for less than 10 ringgits a day, so 80 (2/3 of the aforementioned 120) is probably manageable. Not luxury, but plausible. And some of the people (the ticket selling & collecting operation) is possibly/plausibly working for more than one bus line.

The bus ride to Ipoh was unremarkable - the vegetation in Malaysia, to my eye at least, is a monochrome tropical green, certainly from a bus window travelling at speed. Ipoh, when we arrived, was a fairly unremarkable place. Except for the food: in 20 minutes walk from the hotel down one street and back we saw about 5 restaurants that looked fantastic. The one we ate in was, and it seemed no different to the others. Penang gets a big rap for food, and the food in Penang was excellent, but my feeling is that Ipoh might mount a pretty fair competition. Another thing Ipoh has in common with Penang is the terrace houses; but ultimately the lack of an ocean is hard to overlook.

The hotel we stayed in was hosting a British food exhibition, or so the advertising claimed. It was not clear how or where, although the coffee shop (the coffee was vile, so that was quite British) did have an absolutely magnificent looking apple pie. But it looked like the same untouched pie at 3 o'clock, 5 o'clock, 7 o'clock and 9 o'clock the next morning - so I'm not sure how long it had been hanging around.

Mind you, having spent a ridiculous amount of time in Starbucks in China & Malaysia (internet access guaranteed), it's wrong to ridicule British coffee. American coffee is far, far worse.
We planned to catch an early bus out of Ipoh, but when we got to the bus depot, there wasn't one, so we went to the other bus depot, where there wasn't one either, so we went to a Buddhist cave temple while we waited. There are in fact two temples, one on either side of this lump of rock - probably an interesting place of a geologist, Ipoh, I would guess it is in the crater of a very antique volcano.





It was a very quiet and peaceful place - and very damp.

I tried to buy the temple shop's stock of photographs of the statues, because they had a number I haven't seen before in other temples, and it was too dark for the camera (and my ability to use a flash without generating glare is limited).





Most of them were wadded together in solid blocks and stuck together with mould. It was not very clear how old the temple(s) are - if it was China cave temples go back to around about the BCE into the CE (CE 67 first recorded Buddhist temple in China), but this one seems rather modern. It might possibly go back 100 years, and the bulk of it looks like it goes back about 30 years.






Compared to the temples in KL and Penang, it was very pristine (a polite way of saying not very used).


But still, almost a storybook place for a temple, none the less.