Friday Kelly dropped us to the coach station and we said our goodbyes. We bought our coach ticket to Penang for about £8 each and our coach was due to leave at 11:30 for a 4 hour drive. It wasn't a smooth start, our coach didn't actually leave until 12:45 then about 45 minutes in it stopped for 30 minutes to refuel however we entertained ourself by playing games against each other on the tablet. At a later toilet stop the coach started leaving when Ben was still in the toilet which had Laura panicking and shouting stop, the driver claimed he knew Ben was in the toilet and was just moving the coach to a different position! After crossing what felt like the worlds longest bridge,.... we arrived in Penang. We didn't actually arrive in George Town until 20:00 at night so by this time we were very tired and just wanted bed, we caught a cab to our accommodation and went to bed.

Saturday we headed out at 10:00, got some really nice breakfast from the bakery down the road then caught a cab to Penang Hill. When we got to Penang Hill we realised there were no ATMs so we could not pay to go up the tram, we walked to find a bank which ended up by our next destination, Kok Lik Si Temple, the grounds were actually full of lots of Chinese Temples with shines inside and beautiful gardens, it was very peaceful. After going up a tower in the Temple we felt we had a pretty good view of the city and decided against going up Penang Hill. We caught the bus to George Town centre where we bought minibus tickets for our journey to Krabi Thailand tomorrow and found an Italian for lunch. We wanted to visit the Blue Mansion as this had been advised by a number of people, we asked bus drivers, locals, police officers and no one seemed to know where it was, finally we resulted to getting a cab but the driver told us it was just a 5 minute walk so we walked. After a hour of walking we found a mansion however it was green and looked nothing like the photo, Ben found this very amusing as we had clearly been spending ages looking for the wrong mansion! We gave up and caught the bus to Batu Ferringhi, for Hard Rock Cafe and the night market. We both had a coke at hard rock and after telling the bar man how many glasses Laura has he let us have our drinks 'on the house'. We headed to the night market but were a little too early so stopped for food at a Turkish restaurant which was nice. After, we practiced our haggling skills (taught by kelly) and managed to buy Laura some Oakley sunglasses and Ben a North Face Bum Bag - Ben feels like a real traveller with a Bum Bag, or as he likes to call it a Fanny Pack! We are quickly turning into very stylish travellers!! We caught the bus back to our very basic hostel and got our bags ready as tomorrow we finally hit Thailand!!

Sunday we had to wait outside our hostel at 8 for pick up. The minibus was (thankgod) very clean and had good aircon. We had paid £12 each for a 8 hour journey. We were the first to be picked up and naively hoped that it was just us or a couple more in the minibus but oh how we were wrong, we kept collecting until the minibus 14 full! We were extremely happy when 2 white guys hopped on and Ben chatted with John from Florida the whole way, John and his mate are doing a similar trip to us up through Asia which is comforting to hear. We finally arrived in Krabi at 17:00 and super excited to be in Thailand!!!