Penang Hills and Trails - The Tiger Hill Loop, Part 2
(Air Itam Dam Circular)

This is part of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang. Click here for the index. This is a superb Grade 3-4 walk, mainly based on length although there is a lot of climbing involved too. Ideally we would have split it in two and used the Penang Hill Railway but the fare structure for non-Malaysians is a massive disincentive. Fortunately after an evening and night of rain, temperatures were cool although some of the laterite tracks were rather muddy. I would advise avoiding the weekend for this part as much of it is a popular route for mountain bikers then. There is a sketch map at the bottom showing the route followed,  it starts at the pink square.

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

As described in Part 1, we came up from Air Itam on a steep but basically good route emerging on the Summit Road of Penang Hill. We must have been about half way between the Hill Railway station and Tiger Hill and apart from being a bit later than we should have been, it was an ideal opportunity to check out the Tiger Hill Valley path which turned out to be a superb hike, albeit tiring as part of a very long day. This valley can only be approached downhill and is in effect a bowl in the hills, there seems to be no path which follows its stream.

The Summit Road is nothing more than a 'does the job route' and we found that the original pipeline was being upgraded. Eventually the road reaches a PBA building and starts to descend (it terminates at Western Hill). The first road on the left leads to Tiger Hill proper with its transmission mast; we carried on down till we came to the main valley trail, it's impossible to miss.

For a short while it is a broad concrete path but then that finishes with an abandoned concrete mixer. Good news! From then on most of the trail has been laid with narrower concrete but some time ago so that much is now almost totally degraded and is returning to its natural state. Any bikers coming here for the first time will quickly learn to reduce their speed on the hills! Forest Ang suggests the possibility of using the pipeline steps to Tiger Hill, but they do not look well used, most of the traffic being on two wheels as opposed to two feet.

The trail descends with fine views of the rain forest. As always, the warning signs are totally disregarded by visitors, the smaller signs are for the bikers. As we entered the cleared area in the valley, we passed an abandoned house, presumably connected with the nearby dam.

The actual small dam is just off to the right, it is fed by the head waters of the stream that emerges at Titi Kerawang. There's a small pump house here as well too. 

So vegetation like this splendid tree fern soon gives way and the valley floor appears to be not much more than a giant ginger plantation:

There was just a couple of small houses in use here and as we neared the stream, we found rubber trees being actively tapped: From discarded containers we have seen, it appears that formic acid is still used to coagulate the sticky raw rubber juice (latex).

The biker signs had vanished and I was becoming concerned that we might have missed a junction and would end up, like the stream, at Titi Kerawang. That would not have been a disaster as it was still only 16.00 and should that have been the case we would still have been in good time for the last 501 bus. We ignored the one minor path on the left, crossed the stream and very soon we were climbing - to be honest rather more than I had expected reading Forest Ang's description of the journey in the opposite direction. As we climbed and did not cross the paper from the recent 3rd Penang Rainforest Hash Challenge (http://ph4.me/ link dead by 26th April 2014), it became apparent that we were still on the right trail, confirmed when we saw the temple (Da Ba Gong Lian Jiao Yuan) across the valley. By now Yuehong was rightly complaining about the length of the walk which I had severely underestimated, but when we reached a small col, where the original ridge path crosses - clearly not much used now - I knew that the climbing was over for the day and we would soon reach the critical junction above the Air Itam dam.

At the junction we had a choice of going down the knee jarring steep descent to the dam or carrying on with a more gentle but significantly longer descent around the side of Bukit Elvira. At 17.00 it was a 'no win' decision, we agreed on using the new route, which was mainly concrete except where that had broken up and this was unpleasantly muddy following the previous day's rain. Yuehong did not look happy, but the fact that she was cursing me in English and not Chinese indicated that she still had a little bit left in the tank. However, she did pass on this glorious view:

At 18.15, much to our amazement, we passed a motorcycle heading into the jungle, we were told 'not far' and a few minutes later we had emerged on the road which leads up to the 'Temple with the View' (Bao Tian Gong), note the pole number (NH 2, 21) if you are coming in the opposite direction, it's not difficult to miss this turning.

We had achieved my primary objective which was to leave the jungle before sunset, but it was still a long way 'home'. We were not alone, dozens of bikers come up here in the early evening, some get as far as the temple, others are happy to quit at the hut on the col.

Now there was clearly no room for either of us on the back of one of these, but fortunately just one motorbike with space for a passenger appeared and whisked Yuehong off to the dam. By the time I pitched up 15 minutes later she was somewhat recovered and it was almost dark. It was indeed a different kind of view as we walked across. The final descent could have been a lot worse, most of it was blessed with a modicum of street lighting.

By 20.20 we were on a 201 bus, half an hour later we were demolishing a huge 'nasi kandar' and with an immediate 101 bus we were back in the flat, totally exhausted, by 22.00. We should have slept well, except that I had developed a respiratory system allergy to the mothballs Yuehong had installed, but once I had worked out the cause of the problem, we were soon on the road to recovery.

It had been a great day out, the 5L of water had just lasted and really what was the biggest mistake was not getting started a bit earlier.