Chulia Street

Here is the neighbourhood - my room looks over the courtyard with the temple on the balcony, and the rooftop bar gives the view down the street.

And this is the reason I got a taxi from the ferry - pavements that are not made for wheelie bags and far too much baggage.

Well actually that's not my luggage, but I do feel feel I am over-burdened. These are part of a display at the Penang State Museum.

I had dinner with Peter and Shona and their relatives last night and met Jo and her partner who are probably about the same age as me, both English. Jo's wearing thongs, a t-shirt and an indian cotton wrap-around shirt that looks like just the one I wore when I was in Indonesia in the late seventies. For the past five years they have been doing a cycle between Nepal, India and Malaysia; living from their backpacks and moving on when they need to refresh their visas. In Georgetown they are staying in a budget hotel - no air conditioning, no screens, a shared toilet; all of which costs them about eight pound a night. There is a whole community like them, international grey nomads that they bump into again and again, and they intend to keep doing the same thing as long they can.

Here's a darkened gambling den next to a temple with painted wooden doors. How do I know it's a gambling den? I could hear the rattling of the tiles. Not that I was going to look in. The newspaper this morning reported that in KL the body of an elderly man had been found knifed to death on the 2nd floor of a temple. His son said it was a robbery, his father had been living at the temple since his wife died last year, and he had won a large sum gambling just a few days before the body was found.