Stupas on Penang Hill discovered on the walk down to Sin Fah Thong Temple in Ayer Itam

My wife Bobbi and I are expats living in Penang on MM2H visas. We are over 65 and one of the perks of living here in old age is that with an MM2H visa and being over 65 you can go to the base of Penang Hill and catch the funicular to the top, fast lane, for only 5 ringgit each, about $1.25 US. Normal price for that is around 80 ringgit, $20 each, twice what it costs for normal tickets. Fast lane means they let you in a special line where you bypass the other line where people can wait for one or two hours to catch the funicular up and you go to the head of the queue. When the funicular arrives they open your door first and all the people in the fast lane queue are allowed on the platform. The funicular arrives and the fast lane people board,and then the gates open to fill the cars up with all the others who can fit on board for that trip.

Today Bobbi and I paid 17 ringgit ($4.25) to catch a Grab from where we live to the Penang Hill Lower Station. We left our house around noon, went into the fast lane queue to buy a ticket, and were at the top of the hill (upper station) at about 1 pm. Then the fun began.

We have walked all the way up there before, 5 km from the Botanical Gardens to the top of the hill via the jeep road, taking about 2.5 hours, a hard walk due to the slope of the paved road. Once there we walked down via well marked trails roughly following the funicular to the Viaduct station (three 'stops' above the middle station) and then out from there to the jeep trail, emerging at the 3.5 km point, and walked the rest of the way down.

Another time we walked up from the Moon Gate between the Botanical Gardens and the Youth Park as far as rest station 5. That was our destination for that day but we noticed the trail continued up from there and we asked someone at station 5 where it went. He said it came out on the jeep road and I noticed from Google maps that it appeared to reach Rest Station 39, which was what I was trying to find today.

It's hard to find the ways up Penang Hill, but as expats with 5 ringgit access to the funicular we can get to the top easily and find the ways up by following the trails down and seeing where they come out. This turns out to be a very nice thing to do when living in Penang, something Bobbi and I like very much.

I have been tracking our walks so far in this space
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xKvAUrAPWVtrBY7ioiVflW1chqCbKu3Kkx6MBMhJD3A/edit?usp=sharing

I have been meaning to start a blog with information about our hikes and to share with other hikers whose blogs have guided us. I decided to do it today because on our hike today we discovered something unexpected. We had just come from Penang Hill, back to our left, and the Chinese characters indicate a mountainside full of stupas just ahead.

We had no idea beforehand of the existence of these stupas. They are not the only ones on the trail we followed down the hill. The stupas are marked in Chinese characters and we found the sign below further down the hill at the base of a trail leading up.

The trail is lined intermittently by stupas, but we didn't pursue it today. We were tired, it was getting late, around 4 pm, we didn't know where we were exactly, or how long it would take us to get down.

Also, this is jungle terrain. There are monkeys around, and we had already seen snakes and centipedes on this hike, both potentially poisonous. We wouldn't want to be out here at night without knowing where we were going. Here are some of the more lethal variety we found on the bypass trails heading down from the upper station.

We were given a hard copy map by someone at the top. We had been looking at the map posted on the board there and studying it in such a way that this person came up and said he had been watching us for the last five minutes and what did we want to do exactly. He seemed to want to help.

I told him we were trying to find rest station 39. He knew where it was and he told us we should go down to the Viaduct Station, cross UNDER the station, and then descend to Claremont Station. From there his instructions were less specific but he suggested we would be able to find trails from there to Rest Station 39.

The most direct route to Viaduct is to drop straight down on the bypass roads alongside the funicular rails but when we did this before we found them steep and under maintenance, so we decided to take the longer route that traverses the mountain and drops more gradually. If you take the way we took so that you go the long way (not that long, an extra 15 minutes maybe) you would be on Viaduct Road West, which is where we got one of the best panoramic views we've seen from the hill except for the one at the top. The nice thing about the lower view is that you have it to yourself, whereas the viewing platform at the top is usually crowded with other selfie-takers.

The map here shows the way (shown in blue) we took to reach the Viaduct Station, and the way we took down today from Claremont, the question mark meant to suggest we in fact had no idea where we were. The way in yellow-ish pink highlight shows the route we took from Viaduct on a previous visit to this location, when we walked out to the jeep road at the 3.5 km mark and continued downhill to Botanical Gardens.

The way we took today eventually came out in Ayer Itam. We never did find Rest Station 39. We'll try to reach it next time from Youth Park or Moon Gate, continuing uphill past Rest Station 5, and see where that goes.

But so we'll be able to find our way back here from the Sin Fah Thong temple in Ayer Itam, here is what we found on the walk down.

When we arrived just short of the Viaduct station we had the choice of going up to Viaduct Road East, the way we had taken last time, or down to the station itself (that was actually the middle choice of three roads I didn't photograph, but the rightmost dropped steeply, and an ambiguous sign suggested we take the middle trail, more gradually down) so we ended up at this signboard, where a stairway leads down, and as we were told, crosses under the station and over to the other side.

Here is Bobbi on the other side heading downhill from Viaduct as train speeds quickly the other way up.

The trail from here drops so steeply that I wouldn't want to do it when wet. There are ropes along the route to help with descent, but this is essentially a dry weather path. At the bottom you turn right and after a few paces you reach Moniot Station. You then continue downhill from there on a concrete pathway, easier walking (and if you went left from here it looks like you'd be on Moniot Road and reach the Jeep Road eventually at the 2.5 km mark).

The path down to Claremont station is through an area of homesteads. Most of these have quaint shrines associated with them. Here's a simple shrine set in a rock,and a view of the shrine from an outdoor seating area. You can see that the path leading up is pleasant on a bright sunny day.

Once at Claremont Station we assume the trail continued down along the funicular rail to the Middle Station, the next one down. However we estimated we needed to cross the valley to the next mountain over to reach the Botanical Gardens to the west, and the way to do that appeared to be to head toward the back of the valley along the most prominent concrete trail. Here is the view looking out the valley from there toward Ayer Itam and Georgetown in the distance.

This picture was taken from further in the wrong direction than we had intended, as we found out when we reached peoples dwellings and farm plots, where the people, and their guard dogs, turned us back.

Here is where we had gone off, 15 minutes back down the trail to where we had taken the wrong way. There is shrine here with the trail you see in the photo above going up but another one going down at the tree with the colored cloth tied around it. We took that way this time.

Now the trail became interesting. This is the part where we found the two sets of stupas that we want to come back and explore more thoroughly another time. We also found more trailside shrines like these two:

Following the trail down we soon descended into Ayer Itam though we had no idea where exactly, so I took pictures to use as cairns coming back. Here is the roof of a temple we passed, and a sign showing that it was the (or was near the) Sree Pancha Mukha Anjeneyer Allayam temple.

There were cars on this road, but at the end of it was the first road with traffic, and a temple just inside the entrance to that road:

At the end of the road looking back there were signs which might help point the way on a return trip. I crossed the road to show that there is a green barrier in the road that acts as a traffic divider.

  

When Bobbi turns left down that road, she sees the Sin Fah Thong temple where the road ends in a T-Junction.

At the base of the road, there is a welter of signs which should be easy to identify on a return trip. The first shows Bobbi facing the temple, and in both you can see that we are at Persiaran Taman Cantik.

There is a fire station (bomba) where the ambulance is in the background here. We are on the 202 bus line (bus stop at the Bomba to Bobbi's left in the picture above). 

The Sin Fah Thong temple is shown here on Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sin+Fah+Thong+Temple/@5.4092479,100.2795864,18.5z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x304ac21574e80a19:0xb8798fc0d2484a04!8m2!3d5.4086168!4d100.2811378

Subsequent research shows the following. Here is an overview of where we're trying to reach. The box on the map shows where we would have to go from the trail we apparently were on to Jalan Hock Lok Siew, which would take us to 39 Rest Station.

This is where we were at Sin Fah Thong temple and judging from the satellite view I think this is the road we walked in on (the one going uphill)

If you take this road / trail leading uphill it takes you to a place where you have to cross to Jalan Hock Lok Siew. I remember coming down the trail from Claremont there was a bifurcation switching back uphill (so if you were walking up from Ayer Itam you'd see a main trail going straight ahead and another trail forking to the right heading up into the forest) and had we taken that way (assuming that is what I see on the map below) we might have ended up at Station 39 but with a two hour walk down to Youth Park.

However, further examination of the satellite view shows a switchback trail up from Padang Tembak Dou Mu Gong Jiu Wang Da Di temple behind Batu Gantung Cemetary and the Turf Club race course and golf club. This looks very promising for a next adventure.