So far, both Liz and I love Penang. The resort we are staying at (Bayview Beach Resort) is very friendly and the rooms are the old style i.e. bloody big. The bed in our room seems to be two ultra-king size singles joined together and is enormous! A honeymoon couple would despair because they would take so long to find each other in a bed like this, they would be exhausted by the effort and the marriage might remain unconsummated! Saturday and Sunday were spent mainly sleeping, as I needed a good rest to recharge my batteries. Today (Monday) we hired a car, attached our Tom Tom GPS (freshly loaded with Malaysia maps) to the windscreen, and set forth to do battle with the locals. WOW! These dudes drive like Mark Webber, and the motor cyclists (mostly little bikes with 100cc motors) all think they are Casey Stoner! We were passed this afternoon by a Casey Stoner look-a-like on a tiny Honda motorbike with a commercial carry frame on the back and he was bent forward over the handlebars, hooning along like he expected to break the lap record at the Nurburgring! I decided quickly that the only way to survive was to join them, so I have now learned to go full bore in our little Proton Raja; weave from lane to lane; force my way into the traffic stream --- and consequently just look like a whiter than average local! I really wish I had Liz’s little Merc SLK 350 up here. I would teach these locals a thing or two about how to REALLY overtake on blind corners! We drove the little Proton over the long Causeway to the mainland today. We wanted to see Butterworth because it was a famous air force base for Australia back in the Fifties and Sixties. Anne O’Shea (RAAS’s original secretary) lived there years ago when her husband Michael was based there in the Australian Army. What a bloody Tom Tom disaster. I asked the GPS machine to take us to Butterworth City Centre, but we ended up in a dead end street behind a very dubious looking block of flats. Subsequent attempts at retrieving our position ended up with my driving up a one way street the wrong way! Malaysians are not fazed by this! I just pretended I was really a local who took a wrong turn while engrossed with speaking on my mobile phone (they all do this, even truck and bus drivers). I swerved across two lines of traffic, swore loudly at the lady with the English accent in my Tom Tom --- and normal service was restored. And do you know what? During the whole episode, not one driver blew his horn! Hell, have any of you ever driven in Italy? If you take away their horn, the bloody engine would stop!
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 12:26:18 +0000
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