Day 92 - George Town

We were up in time for breakfast this morning YAY and even sampled some of the local stuff that they had on offer. One was banana bread, the other was just like a sweet roll and the only way we can describe the other one that we tried was Chinese ... you cant quite put your finger on what it is but you know you've tasted the same flavour when you've had a chinese at home, they were all nice though.

After breakfast we got stuck into the much needed research on how we will be getting to Koh Samui and the final decision is we will have to get the train and spend a night in Surat Thani and hope that the hotel in Koh Samui will let us put back our reservation by 1 night. I've emailed the people that we booked the hotel with and they have responded straight away saying they cant see it being a problem but will email us again when they have heard from the hotel.

Happy with our decision we headed for the ferry port and bought our train tickets for tomorrow before jumping in a taxi to Kek Lok Si which is the largest Buddhist temple in Southeast Asia. The taxi driver was quite funny and seemed to have the pussycat dolls album on DVD (he had tellies in his car) on repeat and kindly agreed to come and pick us back up once we had enough time to look around the temple.

The temple looks amazing, it starts with a gift shop then you go through to a huge courtyard where there is a koi pond and some big pagodas (towers) with lots of rocks painted with strange Chinese symbols (i'm sure they're not weird to the Chinese but you can't guess what squiggles say) You climb the steps and get to the 1st prayer room, it has HUGE gold and Bronze Buddha statues everywhere, apparently they get the money to keep building from the Chinese/Bhuddist community and they just keep building and building it. Then there's another pond/fountain and a wall full of buddha statues, We had to take our shoes off to go in the new prayer hall, the room is HUGE and lashing of gold and red paint everywhere. The pillars holding the roof up have dragons coming out of them and there's cool paintings all over the wall. It was a bit weird as the Chinese tourist that came were also praying and we didn't know if taking pics were ok or not during this so we waited a minute or 2 for them to have a good prey n move on.
Next up was the Pagoda of 10,000 Buddhas which is a massive tower with a spiral staircase going right to the top (about 7-8 stories high) each floor had a different Buddha statue on it (he/she takes on many forms) and we were both shattered by the time we hit the top. The stairs are tiny and our feet barely fit on each step but we made it to the top and bottom ok.
We then jumped into a lift which takes you to the top of the hill and the gigantic statue of Kuan Yin the Goddess of Mercy, it's made entirely of Bronze and looks over the entire of Georgetown and most of Penang island (Si stood infront of it to give it some perspective in 1 of the pics) It's 30.2meters or about 100foot tall!

After a stroll around the garden on top of the hill (we could see clouds forming around us we were that high) we headed back down in the lift and hit the gift shop as we had to buy sommat to remember our trip to Malaysia. We opted for a fat little Buddha statue thats made of heavy wood, its cool and only cost about a 5er and the Buddha in his fat state is supposed to bring you money and good luck so fingers crossed we'll be rich soon :)
We headed back to our waiting taxi man and started the journey back to town. We showed him our Buddha purchase and he laughed and said we had chose well and got a good deal although we now have to prey to it to give us money like all the Chinese do.

We jumped out in town and hit the only ATM around in the 7/11 and grabbed lunch, whilst walking down one of the side streets the biggest rat i've ever seen ran in front of us it was HUGE so we wont bother eating in any of the places around here! the sky then appeared to get very cloudy very quickly and we knew what was coming so we headed back and sure enough the rain started pouring just as we made it in.

The hotel in Phangan emailed back saying we could have a room as they were quiet so we're sorted for the 1st 2 islands now yay.
as we had a very late lunch we snacked for the rest of the night while getting a fairly early night (midnight) as tomorrow we have to take a 9 hour train ride to Surat Thani (South East Thailand) to stay the night before heading to Koh Samui the day after.