Don & Kully's World Cruise on Viking Neptune

George Town is the capital of the Malaysian island of Penang. The city has long been a crossroads on the Strait of Malacca, and served as a major port on the prosperous trade routes between India and China. Today the city is Malaysia’s second largest metropolitan area with nearly three million people and the second highest contributor to the nations GDP. The city is home to over 300 multinational companies and is regarded by some as the Silicon Valley of the east because of the number of high-tech companies manufacturing here. There is also a large number of medical supply companies manufacturing medical supplies and equipment, and is one of the world largest producers of latex materials — surgical gloves and condoms – – using native latex rubber.

Today, George Town is one of Asia’s most colorful celebrations of different cultures living side by side in its cityscape. We were able to observe this firsthand on our Viking Optional “Temples and Traditional Crafts” tour. We were greeted by our local guide, Yeat, a very experienced and knowledgeable guide who kept us entertained and well informed during our five hours together. After a brief orientation, we made our way to our first stop of the day at the Thai Buddhist Temple (Wat Chaiyamangkalaram) which houses the largest reclining Buddha in the world. We were fascinated by the ornate decorations of the temple that not only included the reclining Buddha, but many other statues. The temple also contains a large columbarium that holds the ash remains of deceased temple members.

Across the street was the even more ornate Dhammikarama Burmese Buddhist temple with its large standing Buddha surrounded by beautiful carved panels and several other statues.

We continued our tour through the city along the northeast coast passing lovely beaches and resorts into the countryside. We stopped at the Penang Batik Factory for a demonstration of the centuries old wax and dye technique for making colorful fabric.

We also made a stop at a farmers spice market where the local farmer showed us a variety of locally grown fruit and did a demonstration of how nutmeg is processed, and the many products derived from the nut including the traditional nutmeg spice, nutmeg oil and even nutmeg candy. This was followed by a demonstration of how raw latex rubber is harvested from the Rubber Tree. The area is also famous for peppercorn production.

We drove through the high-tech industrial area of the city and saw factories and offices of companies like Bosch, HP, Intel, AMD, Motorola and Osram, as well as the large international airport.

Our next stop was at the legendary Chinese Temple of the Azure Cloud, or Snake Temple. The temple is filled with the smoke of burning incense and a variety of pit vipers. The vipers are believed to be rendered harmless by the sacred smoke. Visitors are warned against picking up the dangerous reptiles. However, there is a vendor with non-venomous pythons that guest can hold and have the pictures taken.

Our final stop before returning to the ship was at an overlook to admire the Penang Bridge an 8.4-mile bridge connecting the island of Penang with mainland Melaysia.

Here are a few of the other things we saw on our drive around Penang today.

Tomorrow we will be in Phuket, Thailand.