After some climbing, we met Racki’s friends Anja and Miri who had arrived on Penang a few days ago, relaxed a bit in a pretty fancy hotel, and were now ready to go on a road trip through Malaysia with us. And of course they brought some Baileys 😁

First stop: A mangrove forest park with lots of green, …

… monitor lizards, …

… mud slippers, who were seem to like fighting with each other, … …

… or settle conflicts of other species, …

… and a new kind of friend we had not seen so far in Malaysia.

Anja and Miri booked a very nice accommodation in Ipoh for all of us and especially the view for the sunsets was awesome.

Racki found a promising waterfall tour of the main tourist attractions on Google Maps and so we went for a nice jungle hike.

No tourists, only locals working and living.

Nice bamboo!

Huge, palm-sized …

… and beautiful butterflies and after some challenging terrain, a fall on slippery stones …

… we arrived one of the most beautiful waterfalls we’ve ever seen!

Happy waterfall hikers! Here is our tour on komoot.

Next stop at one of the most disturbing places I’ve ever visited in my life! From the outside it looked mostly like a chocolate museum. Nice chocolate dinosaur head at the entrance. Inside there were some more chocolate dinosaurs and all kinds of chocolate to buy. So far, so good. There was a lot of crappy plastic toys to buy as well and you could watch some guys making special chocolate pralines. In another room, there were all kinds of fancy teas, fancy ice cream and all kinds of souvenirs. But everything with kind of an ecological branding. Then there was a restaurant as well and then the crazy stuff started: they had all kinds of animals in cages or in very unhealthy types of enclosures. There were lots of goats, rabbits, European hedgehogs, different birds etc. And all of them looked very sweet and cute. Ready to get cuddled and die in a few weeks because of their living conditions. To me it was disturbing and pretty much fucked up.

After the sadness of the last stop, we went to our new accommodation. We shared the outside with a lot of monkeys! One clever monkey mother managed to steal a whole bag of chips from Anja 😁

These monkeys looked like the Grinch and the ai bot made them look like him even more.

We did a boat trip to see some bioluminescent plankton and that looked pretty awesome.

Some more graffiti art.

And a trip into the largest population of fireflies. There were millions of them!

And after that, we did a small trip to some local springs.

Our luxurious bus brought us on the Penang peninsula which was a pretty touristic and crowded place.

But we found a very nice accommodation: Tony’s guesthouse. It was such a nice and calm place with a big community kitchen, eating table and everything. There were very interesting guests and the atmosphere was just nice.

Especially meeting somebody of the rainbow family gave us a nice and interesting perspective on life and the balancing and struggling between planning and just flowing and positive vibes.

And there were a whole lot of graffiti arts at the whole place.

Of course we went to the beach on which some interesting things got stuck …

… or constructed.

And the famous cat beach, a medical station and temporary accommodation for cats which helps them a lot.

About ten cats per visitor.

In the canals there were a lot and very big monitor lizards.

But we sticked to the mango, sticky rice with coconut sauce.

The other day, we went to the monkey beach.

A touristic, but still beautiful place.

With a lot of monkeys who looked kind of nice and innocent like always …

… until they attack you to steal your food, drinks or whatever. One grabbed me on my leg which let me to improve my defensive strategy: louder yelling, rising and waving the arms, and walking towards them until they back off.

We visited a beautiful botanical garden.

Had our feet cleaned.

And almost got stuck in the children slides.

On the way to a hike, the door of the bus broke down and we helped our thankful driver to repair it and were able to continue our ride.

The hike was interesting and nice and it felt very good to have some exercise-like movement again.

The locals stayed mostly at the artificial swimming ponds in the river and we tried the hiking paths.

And met a beautiful lizard.

And a nice view. Here is our tour on komoot.