Staying in Little India was a great experience in itself,
filled with lots of yummy restaurants serving naan and chicken straight from
the tandoor, as well as biryani. Walking through Little India, you pass stops
blaring out the latest Bollywood hits, saree shops, hindu temples, as well as
mosques, and street vendors selling the best samosas, for only 20 cents NZ
apiece.
We visited the Blue Mansion – the former house of prominent
Penang businessman Chong Fat Tzee. Painted a stunning blue colour on the
outside, it was an impressive place full of stories – and as with the Baba Nyonya
house in Melaka, all the different designs and patterns in the wood and steel
work all have a specific meaning (i.e. fish for prosperity etcetera). Even the
layout and location of certain elements of the house have a certain significance;
the house must be centered around the point of most Qi, and the water in the
shallow pool in the central courtyard must not be still but must flow in a
certain direction. It was fascinating to learn these sorts of things. The blue
mansion has also been used in several films, such as Indochine, where it was passed off as Vietnamese. We also visited the Penang Peranakan Heritage
House – another beautiful example of the Peranakan/Baba-Nyonya culture and
heritage.
The Kek Lok Si temple just out of Penang, is the largest
Buddhist temple in Malaysia, and houses a massive statue of Buddha and a pagoda
decorated with an astounding number of Buddha images. We arrived early in the
morning, before it got too hot, and discovered you can in fact take a cable car
up the hill to the site of the temple.
Recommended by the locals, we also bussed out to Batu Ferringhi,
a beach resort area and a nice place to spend a few hours with a beer.
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