To Penang peninsula in Malaysia and encountering the nasty monkey (January 2026)

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 found a pretty much broken viewpoint structure from which we had a good overview of the small town. Here is our hike on komoot with many more photos.