A short bus ride up the West Coast, followed by an even shorter ferry ride from Butterworth took us to Georgetown, the main city on the island of Penang. We spent an age trying to find a bus to take us to Chinatown where most of the budget accommodation is, however when we finally got on one we only had to ride for about 5 minutes before getting off! Never mind.

The temperature seemed to step up a notch in Georgetown and during the day we were both really flagging. We didn't get up to much on the first evening so decided to try and make the most of our second day. Much of the morning was taken up trying to sort out or travel arrangements to Sumatra but after a while we made our way down the island to visit the Snake Temple. I was hoping for something resembling that scene in Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know the one where he gets dropped into that big pit with all the snakes and has a staring contest with a cobra?! Sadly it was not to be. The temple contained about 10 snakes who were all well and truly asleep. There was still one large python, but as per usual you had to pay to touch it or take photos, for tourists only.

We returned to Georgetown and thought we'd had a look at the Chocolate Shop at the end of the road. As we walked into the car park this woman ran up to us and shouted "hello, hello, hello" and upon looking at my t-shirt exclaimed "I not know Sesame Street but we have sesame chocolate!" "Sounds good," I said "lead the way". What followed was the most surreal and yet enjoyable shopping experiences ever. The shop was laid out with 8 different rooms set out from the main hallway. The lady beckoned us into the first room and just started giving us tasters of chocolate, briefly telling us what was in each "Banana" "Pistachio" "Coffee" etc etc. We must have had about 8 tasters in the first room when she then led us onto the next room, more chocolate, and then the next room... you get the idea. We were in chocolate heaven, but had no way of stopping this woman from giving us chocolate! I kept trying to ask about the different ones but whenever I pointed one out that we hadn't had yet she just opened it and gave us some! Sheona couldn't help but start laughing and I was trying to appear serious so that she kept the samplers coming. But it didn't stop at chocolate! Oh no! "and here we have passionfruit cream" "oh, I see, is that different from the passionfruit flavour we had 2 rooms ago?" "yes, with cream" "right" "and here we have coffee, you like coffee?" "yup". There were 6 different urns of various coffees and teas for us to try before another 3 rooms of chocolate! We were both in stitches at the end, and then she followed us around for 5 minutes with a basket but we were so full we didn't need to buy anything so we thanked her and left!

After that we went into a little tea shop across the road for a cup of tea that ended up being tea served exactly as it is in China, with the woman in there showing us the pre-drink rituals, and then putting on a DVD, entirely in Chinese, for us to watch while we drank our little cups of tea. Only when travelling do you get days such as these...

-B