George Town — Jim Winslett

I must say, we’ve been extremely lucky so far on this trip with regards to weather. We’ve been on this trip for just over a month now and we’ve just now had our first bout of rain, save for one overnight shower on a sea day. I’d almost forgotten what rain clouds looked like, but Malaysia was good for a reminder.

FYI: you can click any image to bring it up fully on your screen without needing to scroll

But hey, it finally gave us a reason to use those jackets we packed, so at least there was that. We made it to the bus and discovered an unusual quirk in Malaysian (or at least George Townian?) décor: the buses - ALL the buses, even the city buses - were decorated with swag curtains in the windows. Just what you need, right? A scenic tour in a bus where most of the view is blocked…. by the bus.

Early on in the tour, we stopped across the street from some building. The guide explained that it was called “the blue house” and then gave us a short history lesson on it, none of which I remember. This was what we saw from our side of the bus:

Occasionally, there was something on our side of the bus that I thought I could snap a picture of as we drove by… but the rain on the window and the cord right across the middle of the window meant to hold the vertical drapes in place insured that the camera focused on the window, rather than what was outside.

I eventually gave up on trying to get a photo of anything from the bus. We did eventually stop just as the rain let up and made a little trek through some narrow streets. There were three things pointed out to us. The first two were Taoist temples. A small one…

…and a large one (shown below). The George Town tour company didn’t stagger the buses as well as in the other cities we’ve been to, so it was quite common that two or three busloads of Viking Martians were all trying to see the same thing at the same time.

The third thing they were excited to show us was a piece of wall art (George Town, like Calgary back home, has a lot of public art pieces on the sides of buildings) that incorporates a painting and a real bicycle. It’s clever and well-done and supposedly world famous.

I looked it up. It was painted in 2012 by a young artist from London. This validates the guide’s insistence that “even in London, people know about this.” I’ve also seen photos of people lined up down the street to take a picture of it. Um… OK.
Here it is:

After that, we visited a little area with some shops (it was too early for them to be open) on stilts over the water. You’d never know they were over the water, however, unless you went down a side street and got a glimpse of the area from the side.

Then it was back on the bus and off we went to the harbour, where we stopped for twenty minutes to snap a photo of this bridge for some reason.

Then it was back on the bus again to some well-known temple on top of a hill, but it was absolutely pouring rain again and nobody wanted to get off the bus. So we waited about ten minutes, then buggered off to the next stop. The rain had quit by then, so we all got out and took some photos of monkeys that were hanging around.

Then it was back to the ship, which was fine since it was pouring rain again. We had a nice afternoon nap (multiple days of pushing the clocks forward has given us jet lag… err, ship-lag again) and a good dinner, which finished off with a dessert that I forgot to write down the name of, but it was a local thing with tapioca set around a frozen ball of more tapioca sitting in a bed of coconut foam. It was probably my fave dessert so far on the trip.