Penang Hills and Trails - The Temple with the View
Air Itam Dam to Balik Pulau

This is part of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang. Click here for the index. This is a Grade 2 walk. There is a sketch map at the bottom showing the route followed.

Please visit my Penang buses page for information on accessing the starting point.

With effect from 2022, if you follow this route down from the Temple with the View, then near the bottom you will find you are on a new concrete road. While the path ahead down to the right is still present in part, it is not easy to find a route out. Instead you will need to follow the road down. A description of this alternative route is given on another page - the link will open in a new tab.. 

This walk developed out of our meeting some of the organisers of the 3rd Penang Rainforest Hash Challenge (http://ph4.me/ link dead by 26th April 2014) high above Titi Kerawang on the Two Waterfalls walk, I wanted to research how they had reached that point from Balik Pulau. In the event that never happened as we got seriously delayed by heavy rain and then somewhat distracted, although our eventual route had its compensations. 

We actually again used the path up from Air Itam to the dam. Kek Lok Si, like Hefner's famous Playmates, is over-endowed; it seems they never say 'no' to an offer of yet another statue, these ones are stored in the car park and others are scattered around the site, some yet to be unpacked from their wooden boxes. Ominously, it soon became very overcast and while I managed to walk ahead and get to the shelter just before the dam safely, Yuehong was not so lucky. We sat and watched the rain tip down for half an hour or more which totally wiped out the benefits of what by our standards had been an early start. We watched in amazement as some 50 students marched across the dam, I would love to have gone out and photographed them but I would have got as wet as if I had swum in the dam if I had done so.

Most of the swifts that normally swirl around the dam were sitting it out on the spillway and not surprisingly, the newly erected sign indicated that water levels were reassuringly high with the dry season ahead. That's not real time hi-tech monitoring but a good old fashioned hand job.

With a further shower, we were now 'running' seriously late. When we are investigating what for us are virgin areas, the Chinese temples provide a target in the hills and usually there is someone around who can point us in the right direction afterwards. We turned left on to the Balik Pulau Road and then right at the top, following the further signs. On the way up from the col, we noticed a well worn forest path on the right, I guess this will have led to the junction we had visited on our way to Titi Kerawang from the Air Itam dam. The degree of degradation in the valley below is staggering, although the area around Bukit Penara with the masts is still in part protected by its water catchment status. The dull, damp conditions had brought out this Trilobite Beetle.

There are several roads and concrete paths here, but we stuck with our original plan and headed for the temple. Whoever came up with the location got it absolutely right, (Bukit Ngoh Hean according to the sign on the new electricity substation), this is the panorama looking south-west stitched together automatically from 3 exposures. Rapidly expanding Balik Pulau is to the left and that's Pulau Betong in the centre.

If Da Ba Gong Lian Jiao Yuan not so far away is the most remote temple we have visited (so far) then this would easily claim second place, according to the web it's 435m above sea level and reflects Hakka traditions. The name over the main door reads 'Bao Tian Gong' and in fact, it's far more interesting, dating back to 1907 according to Yuehong's interpretation of the sign over the altar, the main part of which reads 'Wu Xian Da Di' which seems to relate to the fortune telling element below.

With time to kill, as it was raining again, we drew lucky numbers, 69 and 96 as it happens (like most of what appears in our blogs you couldn't invent it!). Yuehong's fortune told her that it may have been raining when she arrived, in Penang that's not perhaps as difficult to get right as elsewhere.

We were discouraged from continuing along the contours ('no path') and descending directly ('lots of dogs'). Instead we backtracked a short distance and headed down a steep concrete motorbike track, most of which was at just the wrong inclination for our knees. Compared to most we had seen, this area was full of much younger trees, including very young rubber, the second bushy tree is nutmeg.

There was just one dog infested house, there were too many to count and the owner kept them back with a big stick, but they can't have been too fierce as the family keeps dozens of chickens as well. Further along we came across the first custard apple tree we have seen:

This is another of those trails which would be difficult to sort out coming up although there was only one major junction - Yuehong indicates the way (right). For the last part, the trail passes through what is best described as a well kept tropical garden, there was nothing special about the plants; individually they seemed to be those seen in gardens everywhere in Penang, but collectively the quantity and quality was impressive.

Visitors are clearly not encouraged, but in practice as nearly always everyone ignores the signs... They would work better for us if they were covered in pictures of dogs and were fitted with an appropriate hidden loud speaker system..

As I had anticipated, we easily found where the Rainforest Challenge had set off into the hills, there was paper everywhere round the entrance to the Catholic cemetery; this will be a hash without checks and so easier than usual to follow. It was just as well that we had not kept to our original plan, the hills all around were almost shrouded in rain clouds and it was pouring again. We picked up another 3kg of rambutans at a give-away price (MYR 5 or GBP 1) and went back on the 502 bus to George Town rather than wait an hour for the 17.30 501 to Teluk Bahang. That way we could have our 'Nasi Kandar' a little earlier; rice, nan bread and heaps of miscellaneous curry washed down with a fresh lime drink. It's what I would call the 'JoJo Moment', named after one of Yuehong's friends in Beijing. It's Penang's version of the Indonesian 'Nasi Padang' but in this case you choose your dishes before you start eating. These restaurants are all over the island these days and this one, between the inbound and outbound bus stops at Komtar has been heaving with customers whenever we have dropped in. All today's burned up calories are very quickly replaced, in a couple of days the cycle will be repeated.