Today started off very well. I got up relatively on time as planned and went for breakfast. My intention was to hire a bike right away and book my ticket for transport to KL right away but the people at the desk are so laid back I swear they're possibly horizontal! So after breakfast I managed to get a bike but will have to book transport later on tonight.

The bike guy was a bit funny with me, he asked me if I had ever ridden before and I said yes and told him which countries and produced my licence etc etc he insisted on baby walking me through all the controls and telling me all the flaws (which was useful I will admit) before telling me to go off round the block and test it. JUST BECAUSE I didn't get it started first time round he just looked at me and said Oh my god. Like I was some accident waiting to happen and crash into the nearest car! Anyway, after I eventually got everything done he also lectured me about being on the left side of the road to which I guess I was a little rude in that I said we already do that in the UK and I laughed.

Bike man aside...riding out of Georgetown is a little bit of a pain, mainly due to all the random one way streets that are in the centre of town, which are also not labelled as one way. You simply discover it once you are already out there riding around. Anyhoo the intention was to go to the Botanical gardens this morning and I got lost. However on the way back I somehow ended up in the right place! I am wondering whether this is a bad time of year to go there because there were hardly any flowers and everything was locked up in their atriums so you couldn't walk round. Although there is a randomly large amount of wild monkeys just milling about. Also I was very disappointed with the Japanese Garden, it neither had anything or even remotely resembled anything Japanese. I suppose I was expecting something similar to the Japanese Garden in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

Someone also told me how to get to the waterfall and Penang Hill station so I thought it would be a good walk. Oh no...it was over 1300 steps to the top which is more than Tiger Cave in Krabi. Once at the top it was nice, apart from it raining a bit and the massive thunderstorm which made the steps like a water slide *laugh*. At the top you could see all of Penang (well the top half headed over Georgetown and out to sea).

After the rain had slowed down a bit I decided to just take a random drive about. I ended up going along to Batu Feringgi beach which is alright but once you have seen the beaches in Thailand it doesn't compare. If you go a bit further along the next beach is much nicer. I thought I would just keep going and I came across the Teluk Bahang Dam which was very nice, it looks like a man made lake similar perhaps to Dorney Lake in the UK. I kept going and the best bits were still to come. The traffic in the towns had been quite heavy but once you are out on the open road it is almost just you and the bike on the road. I biked through mountain passes and up and down roads which would rival some of the bends in Wales! It was amazing to look out over the mountain pass and see all of Penang Island stretching into the distance and the sea surrounding it.

I was supposed to also go and see Kek Lok Si temple but once I had found it in Air Itam I couldn't find the entrance. Nothing is signposted very well in Penang, you just keep going somewhere and find out you've gone the wrong way too late to turn round *laugh*. So I just looked at it from a distance, very colourful and has another temple right next to it with a massive carved statue of a woman, similar to the St Anne which is on main land Penang. When I say massive I mean about 30 to 50 ft tall maybe even more as I wasn't too close.

Decided to go back to the hostel as my arms were about to lock into shape of the opening of the Macarena they'd been on the handle bars for so long. To my surprise though...the bike cost almost 1 pound to fill up with petrol! I was thinking holy hell all the way round at what I'd used and then laughed silly at the end!

Off to Red Garden again tonight for dinner and then hopefully I'll get some sleep for a 9am pick up tomorrow and 5 hour (yeah right) journey to KL.

The picture is me at the top of Penang Hill Station.