Confident that we could survive a relatively short flight to Penang, via Kuala Lumpur, we booked a 9 night holiday there in February. Searching the interweb for suitable flight times and prices, we chose an Air Asia flight to take us there and a Scoot flight (via Singapore) to bring us home again.
The day before our departure, we were notified by email that the first leg of our journey had been re-scheduled and would now leave at 11.35a.m. instead of at 9.45a.m., 1 hour 50 minutes later, which meant that we would miss our carefully chosen connection from KL to Penang but we felt that we could cope with that. Our eventual departure time was at 1.25p.m., after our plane load of passengers had boarded and then sat patiently waiting for another hour and fifty minutes while a couple of engineers who'd boarded the plane shortly before our 'amended' take off time, tried and eventually succeeded in fixing a problem with the lighting. Consequently, we had about a 3 hour stop in KL before our 9.40p.m. flight to Penang, followed by a 1 hour taxi ride to our hotel, finally arriving at a little after midnight. So our originally planned 8 hour journey actually took about 15 hours but I'm happy to say that there were no hiccups on our return 9 days later.
We were very happy with the hotel we'd chosen, our room was large and comfortable, in need of some minor maintenance, spotlessly clean and though initially disappointed that we didn't have a sea view, we soon warmed to the hills view and the street scene below us, which turned out to be a great source of entertainment from our balcony, where we sat in the cool of the mornings with a cuppa and in the afternoon/evenings when the sun was setting behind us.
During our stay, we made great use of the lovely, large pool, tried out many of the cafes across the road from the hotel and further along the road, took a bus ride into the capital, Georgetown, a busy, busy town which bore little resemblance to the Georgetown we visited over Christmas, 2000. So, we swam, walked along our beach (not suitable for swimming, very murky with large jellyfish in residence), hired a rental car on two occasions and drove around the island, read, did our daily Waffle word puzzles (fodder for the old brains) and had a thoroughly enjoyable holiday.
We took many, many photos (it's what we do!), a few of which appear below:
