Youth Park to Rest Stations 3, 5, 39, and traverse to Post 84

March 17, 2020

In a speech by the prime minister to the nation last night, a lockdown to control the pandemic was declared starting on March 18. So while the tuff who go shopping were casting concerns with social distancing aside as they ransacked the stores for whatever supplies they could find, toilet paper being the most prized (and most unnecessary) item, and stood for hours elbow to elbow in long queues at overwhelmed cash registers, Bobbi and I headed for the Youth Park.

As it turned out, it was a wise move, because lockdown happened quickly after that. All the parks are closed now, not sure when we'll be able to get back here, if we survive the threats to health and economy.

But on our last day of freedom, we made a great walk up Penang Hill trying to knit some trails together. We've been up from Youth Park often to rest station 3 and on up to 5, then up not so steeply to 39, and down various ways from there to Ayer Itam or back to the Youth Park. And we've been up to the upper station in various ways (best is to ride up and walk down; worst is to walk the Jeep Road, either up or down) and from the top of the funicular track we've been down to Viaduct station and dropped down from there to Moniot Road which runs to the south to Claremont Station and down to Middle, or to the north to Post 84 on the Jeep Road. But today we walked up from Youth Park all the way to 39 and then carried on up the trail from there and ended up at Post 84, from which we took forest trails back down to Botanical Gardens.

There were few people in the Youth Park when we arrived there. No one prevented our entry to the park and movement up the trails, and we met only a few people coming the other way, a good place to exercise and keep social distance at the same time.

I decided to go what I think is the easiest way up. You enter the Youth Park and bear right until you come to the statue of the Karate Kids poised in tentative combat. To your right you will see a model of the funicular and beyond that a trail heading up.

The model of the funicular is on the concrete base obsured by this sign. The trailhead is the stairway marked by the blue sign with the yellow stripe on top.

It was tempting just to take the funicular.

This trail leads you up a gradual slope through a monkey forest and then steeply up to Rest Station 3 at the top of a long set of stairs rough-hewn into the forest path. Pausing for rest we heard a rustle in the forest. At first we couldn't make out where the sound was coming from, but we soon located it to be coming from a monitor lizard foraging in the underbrush.

According to the time stamps on my photoes, we started our walk at noon and reached station 3 a sweaty 30 minutes later. I Whatsapped this picture out to my Thursday Rambler friends who were posting their pictures from the crowded supermarkets. After a short rest, Bobbi and I moved out from Rest Station 3.

The sign here notifies us that we are on private property soon to be developed. It urges us to form a committee to work with the developers who are willing to help the community to provide an alternative route around their development.

The trail up from Rest Station 3 is the most taxing part of the hill walk, another half hour of more punishing steps until you broach the top and come out on a shed where you can find a seat and rest. But the trail is relatively flat after that, just a few minutes from there up to Rest Station 5.

Rest Station 5 is one of the gems of this side of the mountain. It is an oasis in a mountain jungle. There is a temple here with water works trickling the water down slender leaves overhanging a pool. There are tables and chairs on a veranda overlooking the coastline, an exercise area for people who haven't had enough just getting here, various artworks painted onto the rocks, and even a place where you can pour yourself tea (on weekends, when it's busy).

But our goal today was Rest Station 39 -- well not Rest Station 39 exactly, but the rock on which is painted "39".  So after a short break, we moved on up the hill, at a gentler slope now, with nice views from the trail.

Within a half hour we came to this newly maintained bridge

15 minutes further up the trail we found ourselves walking in a trench that looked like it had been augmented in the past to allow for the passage of water buffalo (just speculating).

And a few minutes beyond that we came to the boulder that has 39 painted on it with an arrow pointing down to the left. Bobbi is standing in the trail sloping up to the right, the one we wanted to explore today. It had been right on two hours since we had left the Youth Park.

I've been to Rest Station 39 a couple of times; it's also a beautful place, just down the hill from its marker rock, well tended by its caretakers, and has one of the best balcony views you could possibly get from Penang Hill, of Ayer Itam all the way from Kek Lok Si on the hill to the right to the large Penang State Mosque in the valley below, and Penang Bridge to Butterworth and the seascape it crosses. 

There are a couple of ways up or down from there. You can drop down the steps from 39 and continue all the way down to Padang Tembak Dou Mu Gong Jiu Wang Da Di Temple Taman Ayer Itam, https://hikingpenang.blogspot.com/2019/11/padang-tembak-dou-mu-gong-jiu-wang-da.html, or you can go down as far as marker 33 where you find an easy path leading north to a bee farm and eventually back down to Youth Park.

But the big adventure for us today was not to go down the hill to Rest Station 39 but to push on from there on the trail that looked like it might be climbing the mountain to where I imagined Post 84 should be, but it turned out was going slightly downhill. You get similar views along this trail as from RS 39, but through a forest canopy as opposed to from the natural balcony that makes Rest Station 39 a special place that people like to congregate after walks up from Ayer Itam and linger over cards and tea.

It was a fairly level trail with some slippery eroded parts, and a few fallen trees making the going sometimes tough

But not too tough. Still, the trail twisted us so far down hill that I thought it might end up somewhere in Ayer Itam eventually. But we kept on it, following the red arrows attached to various objects with metal coils, until we came to this yellow sign indicating where we were headed, about half an hour out from the 39 marker boulder.

It was good to have the reassurance, but the sign was not strictly necessary, since there were no other branching trails that I noticed. The sign might have said, Post 84, 10 min. That would at least have been informative, but if it's your first time on these trails, it's nice to at least know you're on the right one.

Post 84 is a new station that has been built by the side of the Jeep Road. It wasn't there a couple of years ago.

Just behind Bobbi is the trail we walked in on. If you walk back up that trail, right away you come to a fork in it:

The left fork goes back (or on, depending which way you're headed) to Rest Station 39. Follow the right fork and at about as far down as you can see in the picture above, you find a trail going to the right, past the shed you see here:

That trail leads to the stupas or back to the Sin Fah Thong Temple in Ayer Itam, over a gnarly trail (as in gnarled roots) and past a house which warns of dogs, so be careful if you take this trail (number 3 in the options below).

So Post 84 is the confluence of many trails, the focal point of many pleasant walks all the way or halfway up and down Penang Hill. You can get to Post 84 in several ways. Here they are the ones I know of:

1. You can walk up the Jeep Road. This is straightforward from a navigation point of view but is miserable if you are trying to hike. It's unrelentingly steep, and you have to dodge the vehicles going both ways, so it's not a stroll in the forest. At any rate, halfway up the hill, at around the 2.5 km marker on the 5 km road, you come to Post 84 and you can see the Moniot path well marked just to your right, or Bobbi's left, in the picture above.
2. You can come down the funicular line to Viaduct, or go up to Claremont, and from Viaduct drop down to Moniot Road. Or if you are at Claremont there is a marker further up the path almost to Moniot Station pointing the way north to Moniot road. I'm sure you could get to Moniot from there, though the trail appears truncated coming south from the other way, but nevermind, however you get to Moniot Road, you continue along it on a fairly nice trail, with only a couple of places where people have left ropes to help you down the worst bits, and you eventually emerge on the Jeep Road at Post 84.
3. You can find your way to the golden stupas from Clairemont station on the funicular line [https://hikingpenang.blogspot.com/2019/03/stupas-on-penang-hill-discovered-on.html], or head up from Ayer Itam toward the stupas, and you'll see a trail branching north up the hill. This leads over private property with signs warning of dogs, but when I did it I didn't see any dogs, and the trail skirted the property that the dogs would have been defending. From there it went uphill on a root-clogged trail, but eventually came out at Post 84.
4. You can start out on the pipe-track path into forest just over the bridge opposite the Waterfall Cafe and after 100 meters or so make the right turn from there up the path marked with orange writing on a rock and head up the path with yellow and white bands on trees guiding you uphill. Steeply uphill you go, on trails that are difficult coming down over the roots. Eventually you level out and come onto Post 84.

I'll post more about that last option when I get a chance to go back through photos of previous walks. For now, just puttering about the house, thinking to walk up and down the steps here in my condo to keep in shape for more walking once the COVID-19 threat has passed.

Penang National Park Monkey Beach to Muka Head Light House back to park headquarters

On January 9, 2020 Bobbi and I joined the Thursday Ramblers for a hike in Penang National Park, starting at Monkey Beach and hiking up to Muka Head Light House, then walking back to the park headquarters.

I didn't know this but on a weekday you can hire a boat with ten seats to take you from the jetty that juts from the back of the park headquarters over to Monkey Beach for just 40 ringgit, about US $10. If you're ten people, a dollar apiece saves you an hour's hiking which you're going to have to redo on the way back anyway.

I'll have to write this up later, with pics from my cell phone, but for now, here is the one Tse posted on Facebook of all ten of us starting out on the trip.

Vance and Bobbi walk from Air Itam Dam to Balik Pulau in 4 hours

I was surprised that that's all the time it takes to walk from Air Itam Dam just up from Kek Lok Si temple in the bustling market town of Ayer Itam all the way over the mountain to the costal plains where lies Balik Pulau on the other side -- just 4 hours.

I finally worked out that the two were that close when the Thursday Ramblers staged a 3-hour out and back hike from the dam parking lot to the hillside temple of Ngor Hean recently, and that my contacts in the Sunday hiking group based in Balik Pulau were offering walks to the same destination in a similar time frame from the other side of the island. We haven't been able to make either walk, but when I looked it up on Google maps, I found that the dam-to-temple route should take 1 hour and 9 minutes, and the the temple to Balik Pulau was pegged at an hour and a half down the rough road which emerges onto 4 lanes just short of the small town of Balik Pulau itself.

The Thursday Ramblers created an event here, https://www.facebook.com/events/459534198030291/
The proposal read

• Surface: Concrete and sealed paths almost entirely.
• Topography: Mostly flattish, with a gradual rise to temple, with gradients no more than 20º.
• Elevation Gain: 320m
• Distance: approximately 8km round trip.
• Meet at 9:00am at Carpark. https://goo.gl/maps/5E53dZy8rCkBmtLw9

That seemed pretty straightforward. I also found a bicyclists' blog post that gave pictures of the junctions encountered on the walk
https://www.penangcycling.com/2017/07/24/ayer-itam-dam-hill-turnhilton-ngor-hean-%e4%ba%94%e6%98%be-temple-mountain-cycling/

I made a pdf of this and parked it on my cell phone so we could refer to it as we trekked, even if we didn't have a data signal en route. As it turned out, the signal was pretty steady the whole way, at least whenever we checked Google maps on the way down to Balik Pulau.

That post gave a pretty clear picture of every turn except for where exactly to begin the hike. Here's what it looked like from the blog post:

I followed the instructions as best as I could work out. The Grab taxi let us off at the car park. Walking ahead with the lake on our right, this is indeed what we saw, but the gate and signage had been altered so I wasn't sure I was going the right way when we walked through the gate on the right. But the motorbikes were there and up ahead I asked someone if this was the right way, and despite pronunciation problems -- the temple name is sometimes written Ngor and Ngoh, and Hean and Han, so I tried various combinations, and at last my interlocutor understood, ah, Noh Han, he repeated back to me, or something like that, and pointed the way forward.

But by then I was already past the gate so I missed getting a picture of its new appearance. I finally pulled out my phone to film these entertaining monkeys just a few minutes further up the road.

In the video you can see (on a fine day) the pleasant surroundings and glimses of the Air Itam reservoir in the background. Here is another shot from just a little further up the pleasant jogging, hiking, motorcycle, bicycle, and occasional car-traveled tarmac.

By now I was determined to update the pics on that fairly accurate blog post we were following. The first junction was pretty obviously marked. In this one the new paved road goes off to the right to continue around the lake, and the concrete road you want is uphill and signposted Ngoh Hean. Here are the road view and signage views.

When you keep on keeping on up the hill you eventually come to a little temple on your right with a makeshift exercise gym on your left, in case you're in the mood after the hike so far. In any event, it's worth a few photos.

Not too far uphill past that you come to the "Hill Turn" shed. There are benches and shade here. The road to Ngor Hean goes off about half an hour to the right, and if you carry on straight you eventually arrive in Balik Pulau. Incidentally, the shaded walk uphill with trees on both sides ends here and at mid day and this high up on the mountain, or more correctly bukit, the path ahead is mostly in sunshine.

Just uphill at the next juncture, it looks like the road to the left leads to a B&B of some kind. To reach the temple just keep following the red on yellow signs, here pointing right.

Lots of langur monkeys live up here. At this next juncture, it's an obvious right hand way

Bobbi thought this one would look better with me in the picture :-)
























At this one the sign points to the left, taking you into a steep downhill hairpin.

If there is any ambiguity, it will be resolved by the presence of flags on lampposts in the correct trail ahead.



























At this last juncture, you can see the temple at the end of the path off to the left

This last hundred meters is lined with buckets collecting something from the trees.
Does anyone know what? If so, leave us a comment.

Here are some views from around the temple.

You can see Balik Pulau and the other side of the island from here.

Worshippers at this temple carry handfuls of prayer papers and burn them in these ritual stoves.




























There is evidence of even more serious burning here.

From here we headed back down to the Hill Turn and instead of turning left and back to Ayer Itam, a predictable hour back to the lake, we turned right and descended toward Balik Pulau.

It's a steep descent, knee jarring and foot burning, infrequently dotted with homesteads, not any of them welcoming to strangers.

The signs on this open gate
say "No admittance"
and "Beware of dog"

Given the patina of neglect here I doubt that anyone is feeding the dog.

But we didn't test that theory.















We continued an hour down the hill with the sounds of a rippling brook to our left which we eventually crossed when we reached the valley floor where the Annamadavihari Meditation Center's strikingly modern but rustic buildings nestle into the hillside. After another half hour on we came to the Suriana Botanic Conservation Gardens. The gardens at least appeared to welcome visitors ...

 well, uh, I guess you're welcome there as long as you don't actually try to enter ...

At least they don't threaten to sic dogs on you. What caught my eye about the Suriana Botanic Conservation Gardens was this hand wrought tree sculpture across the street from it.

People were growing pineapples in roadside gardens here.

It was another half hour hike into Balik Pulau from here. We soon passed a large catholic cemetery. The last fifteen minutes opens into a 4-lane street which has catholic schools and churches either side of the road. We soon emerged on the market where we paused to establish physical presence by having our likenesses taken.

We have just walked down from the mountain in the background. Turning up the street to our left, your right as you look toward the market, we come out on the KFC, another landmark in Balik Pulau. Just beyond the KFC is the bus terminal. Within a quarter hour of arrival there, we were on a 502 bus back to Komtar, in Goergetown, where we easily got a bus back out to Tanjung Bungah, where we live.

We had left our home in a grab at around 10 am and started our walk at about 11 am at Air Itam Dam and by 3 pm we were on a bus back home. It was a nice day, a day where once again we learned something more about the scale of the small island on which we live.