There are lots of touristy things to do in Penang. Part of me felt that I ought to take full advantage of being there and do as much as possible, and part of me felt that my real purpose for visiting was simply to be there, and that being there might or might not include tourist activities. As it turned out, and as I will explore in a later post, the more mundane, ordinary and even boring moments of my trip became some of the most significant.
Our one touristy activity away from the Hard Rock Hotel was a visit to the Butterfly Farm. This satisfied my desire for something light, pretty and tropical, and the Teenager’s interest in equally tropical but much more ugly creepy crawlies.
The butterfly enclosure is lovely, if a little claustrophobic. And the butterflies are amazing, large, colourful and so very many of them. I was a little afraid I might squash one if it got too close but I stayed relaxed and was fine. There was a kindergarten class visiting at the same time as us and it was lovely to see them watching the beautiful butterflies.
One characteristic of travelling with an 18 year old is that a lot of one’s sightseeing is done at lightening speed. We walked round all the paths of the butterfly enclosure and it wasn’t long before we had ‘done’ it all. So then we moved on to the creepy crawly side of the visit. There were an alarming number of different shapes, sizes and colours of frog and quite a few snakes, safely behind glass. I have seen snakes in the wild on several occasions, some of them in the garden or even in the house. Luckily I am not afraid of snakes but I do have a healthy respect for them. Most of the snakes encountered in South East Asia will either give you a nasty (possibly fatal) bite or try to squeeze you to death before they eat you.
There were all sorts of insects including scorpions that were in a sort of pit but not separated by an actual physical barrier from the visitors, including the children. Everyone seemed to escape unharmed.
Most of the time, I was very comfortable with the insect life in Malaysia. Cockroaches used to be everywhere, and I suspect that there are still plenty of them although I personally didn’t see any. My closest encounter was one night, when I was about 15 and lying in bed trying to get to sleep. I felt something brush over my face and after a moment thought I would turn on the light to investigate. I looked at my pillow to see a large, shiny cockroach sitting there. You can imagine how loudly I screamed and how much I washed my face!
My other memorable moment was when, arriving at the home of my parents’ friend for a barbecue, I felt something walk up my leg, inside my trousers. I didn’t take much notice until I felt a searing pain on the inside of my thigh. Then another and another. I grabbed my mother and we ran upstairs to the bathroom. Ripping off my trousers, I found several very large red ants crawling on my leg. I must have stepped on a nest when I got out of the car. I can still feel that pain and the memory makes me go cold all over!
Those are the only really unpleasant insect-related memories I have from six years in the tropics, so all in all not too bad. If I was someone who attracted mosquitoes, or who reacted badly to their bites, I might add them to the list of negatives, but for me their most annoying trait was the awful whining I would hear if one was trapped in my bedroom at night. Pleasant experiences, however, were almost daily. The comical geckoes (or ‘chi chaks’) which lived on all our walls and sometimes got squashed in the patio doors, the constant background music of cicadas, wonderful flying things and the occasional, exciting arrival of a monitor lizard. There is life all around, and the overall impression is one of incredible vibrancy and energy.
I’d love to have brought home beautiful photos of butterflies, both to show as holiday photographs and to use to illustrate blogs etc. Not being the greatest or most patient photographer, however, I found it almost impossible to capture any of the dazzling, flitting, never-still creatures. Their essence is really in their movement, the way they can be everywhere at once, and the memory of that essence, that movement and energy, is still within me.
