We all slept in as
long as we could this morning, eventually getting kicked out of our
beds by the train attendant, who wanted to turn them back into seats.
A bit later, the train pulled up at the border, where we all got out,
with our bags, to take our turns jumping through the immigration
hoops – both Thai and Malaysian. The process went wonderfully
smoothly for us, and before long we were back on the train looking
out the window at one of our fellow passengers, for whom the process
was going much less smoothly. We had all clocked this guy earlier, as
he looked distinctly odd. Tall, thin, white, reasonably young, bald
(perhaps even hairless, although his hair was growing back), he was
dressed in a matching outfit of loose top and trousers – could
easily have been something a patient would wear in a hospital. We
could see him inside, talking and gesticulating animatedly with a
woman we assumed was from Thai immigration (she wasn't wearing a
headscarf and they seemed to be at the Thai end of the building). She
appeared to be pointing back the way we had come. He didn't seem to
be losing his cool – indeed, he seemed to be resigned to his fate,
and sure enough, as the train pulled away from the platform, he
wasn't on it. (We later quizzed some of the other people on our train
but no-one knew what was going on – my best guess was that he was
trying to skip out on some unpaid hospital bills.)
When we finally
arrive in Butterworth, we walked up from the platform into the
station, looking around in vain for an ATM and directions to the
ferry terminal for the boat across to George Town on the nearby
island of Penang. Kate asked one of our fellow passengers, a local
man, for directions to the terminal and he very helpfully showed us
to a free shuttle bus (all of the other white folks walked over).
When we got there, we again looked in vain for an ATM, which then
presented us with a problem – we had no local money and no source
of local money to pay for our ferry tickets.
One of the ferry
staff suggested that I might be able to find a money changer nearby,
so I ran off in search of one. I found some police manning a desk at
the bottom of some stairs and asked them if they could tell me where
I could find a money changer or an ATM. They pointed to a large
building some distance away across a tangle of roads and said I could
find an ATM there, so I started heading that way. I hadn't gone far
when I came across a few bus touts who asked where I was going. I
mentioned that I was looking for a money changer and a woman asked
how much I wanted to change. I looked through my wallet and
discovered that I had a very small number of small-denomination Thai
notes and quite a large number of large-denomination bills. I handed
over all of the small stuff and got a small amount of Malaysian
ringgit back – which I hoped would be enough to cover the ferry
tickets. I ran back clutching my cash, which thankfully just met our
needs and we went through the barriers to join the scrum of people
waiting for the next ferry.
About half an hour
later, we climbed aboard the ferry, which was pretty basic inside –
just rows of bench seats in a huge open space. After we disembarked
we looked again for an ATM, again in vain, and for some sort of
information centre, also in vain. Eventually Kate found someone who
said that there was an ATM across the road and behind some buildings,
so I left the others with the bags and went off to search for it.
This involved a long loop around the back streets, but eventually I
got some cash and also found a lovely big air-conditioned café/bakery
with wifi a not-too-long walk away.
I led the others
there and we found a quiet corner where we could let the sweat dry
and figure out how to get to our hotel. There were even some power
points where we plugged in and charged up. We bought a couple of
pretty good coffees to pay them back for generously providing us with
a sanctuary from the heat outside and then gathered everything up and
set off. The staff told us that we could simply walk straight up one
of the streets outside, which we duly did. George Town is one of
those frustrating places where there's a perfectly good footpath –
in this case quite a lovely one, contained in a colonnaded passageway
alongside the buildings – that the local businesses consider to be
a continuation of their premises, forcing pedestrians to walk in the
road; the busy road populated by large buses and impatient
motorbikes.
The walk to the
hotel was hot and long, but we made it eventually, checked in and
were shown to our room – by a very cheerful, energetic young guy
with very little English. We tried to ask about the mortgage
documents that we'd had redirected to the hotel, but he just smiled
and indicated that he had no idea what we were talking about with a
vigorous shake of his head and said that we should talk to 'the
Boss'. Never mind – the room was nice, located across the road from
the reception area on the first floor, high-ceilinged, clean and
spacious, with windows that opened onto the street.
By now it was after
5pm and we hadn't had lunch, so we headed out to see if we could find
somewhere to get a beer and some chips. We ended up the Monalisa Cafe, a wonderfully old school place that looked like it hadn't
changed in decades and had the characterful staff to match – a
middle-aged Asian woman in a man's shirt and trousers with short,
slicked back hair; grandma playing online slots on a tablet in the
corner; granddad slumped in a chair at the entrance watching the
world go by, then getting slowly up to show us to a table; and, an
effusive, energetic, skinny woman, presumably the owner, who came
over and offered us free fruit – watermelon or pineapple. We would
be doing her favour by eating it, she said, as it was just going to
go off otherwise. She returned with a plate piled high with fresh
pineapple, which the girls set upon with relish. We then chatted to
her for a while and she mentioned that the night market that we were
planning to visit for dinner would be diminished tonight. Instead,
she pointed us in the other direction to a 'food court', which we set
off for when we had finished our beer, chips and pineapple.
It proved to be a
sort of street food lite – a large central eating area surrounded
by small stalls selling all manner of culinary delights (fish head
curry anyone?). You simply choose your dishes from a variety of
vendors, place you order, giving them your table number, and they
bring it over to you (and then you pay, which seems a bit
strange). We ordered some sushi for the girls and some noodles,
veges, satay sticks and roast duck for us and sat down to wait for it
to arrive – ordering some drinks from a passing woman in the
meantime. The food, when it came, was all good – the girls went
back a few times for more sushi – but the place lacked atmosphere
and we won't be back.
No comments:
Post a Comment