Penang Hills and Trails - Purgatory
Bukit Genting (Malihom) to Anjung Indah

This is one of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang, click here for the index. This is a Grade 2 walk although quite long. 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.

IMPORTANT

As of January 2024, the route south from Anjung Indah has been blocked by a new owner with a security fence backed up by razor wire.

This January 2017 walk is essentially an update of the one reported in March 2015, it's interesting to see how the different the countryside looks, very brown then at the end of the dry season and very green this time as the wet season refuses to go away. There's also a very interesting tit bit near the start...

Yuehong's old friend Du Jian Bin was in town and I was asked to supply a walk which would showcase the new Yuehong and maybe leave him a little bit tired. We had yet to visit Malihom or the upper Sungai Ara valley this trip so it provided an excellent excuse to repeat an earlier walk. We took the tried and tested route to the start above Genting using the 101, 501 (10.30) and 401 buses. When I used to run with the hash 40 years ago sometimes we used to drink the odd Golidie Lager before the start to spice things up, but water never.

In front of us was a brand new Chinese temple, as regular readers will know, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. At first sight it seemed relatively normal although Yuehong tells me now that the large characters translate variously as "Hells' Altar" and "Prayers in the Underworld"! 

On entering, things took a distinctively unusual turn. That altar behind looked very strange, particularly as there were dozens of empty Guinness bottles and cans underneath.

The characters above were non-human and those are cigarettes being smoked. Only when you go behind the curtain does a degree of normality return.

My first question was "Hokkien or Hakka?" but the answer was "Guangdong", ie Cantonese. As I understand it, this is a temple dedicated to some kind of Chinese purgatory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diyu) where the (evil) spirits pass judgment on recently departed souls. Should your lifestyle be less than perfect and most of us fall into that category, the obvious way to end up in the right place (ie the altar behind the curtain) is to bribe the judges. Simple eh? Money can acquire you peace in the afterlife. In this case it means buying a case or two of Guinness which is known to be a good substitute for those blue pills and burning a candle or two with your name on just so they know it's you. It's the kind of crap that the Roman Catholic church has been peddling for over 1000 years, there's nothing new in the game that is religion.

It seems our friend, the caretaker, had tried to set up in Pulau Betong down the road which has quite a reputation for whacky temples particularly those that tell fortunes for money. However, this was too lurid even for them and he was told to find a new home for his business and hence he had ended up here. It's only just off the main road and well worth a visit even if you're not hiking.

Quite what the neighbours think, I have no idea but we took our leave and walked up ignoring the (newly replaced) trespass notice, as we always do, they're really only meant for those with 'wheels'.

At the corkscrew statue, we took the path behind and noted that a lot of the older fruit trees had been cut back or even felled.

On what I assume is the Malihom Estate, young trees have been planted. Elsewhere, even more rubber trees have gone and progress in replanting is somewhat slower. Unfortunately, the Burmese together with their noisy dogs and mountains of rubbish have returned to the birds' nest factory.

Below, we took a small diversion to the Chinese temple which has the builders in. Compared to our earlier visit, this seemed to be very mainstream. I was interested to see that much tidying up was going on in the durian estate opposite, this whole hillside seems to have been let go for quite a few years and I know no paths in it, let alone ones which might go up to the ridge, which itself was formerly rubber but is now rather overgrown (see The Buddha's Revenge).

After which we walked down to the Thai temple which seems to have had one of Penang's many street artists in. It was lunch time.

Afterwards I let Du and Yuehong walk ahead as they go back a long way and don't get to meet too often, I prefer my walks 'quiet'. We went down to the Sungai Ara valley and turned left at the 'Cyclists Rest'. At the point where there are roads everywhere in front, we knew to turn right and into the old rubber.

This used to be the best part for me, but while the first section is still as it was, later the owners have taken to enclosing their properties, maybe there have been too many cyclists and hash runners along here. It's necessary to turn left, right and left again to join the 'main road' up the hill (which starts in Relau 'village'). You could go wrong but you'd have to try quite hard.

Since this new development has been completed, we've had a cut-off available. The trick is to follow the edge of the fence and turn up into the orchard.

There's a short but well defined section which has not been concreted and then it's just a question of picking the correct right turn, there are several. The one we needed is more of a 'straight on' as it happens. 

The hut is a good landmark, the calendar on the wall is now 17 years old. Beyond the path finishes and it's a short but easy scramble up to the bananas, basically at the moment that means heading for the lowest planted level but that may change.

Yuehong was back in teacher mode as we went through the long grass and as this time I had got it correct, the onward path was right in front, it was time for the second half of my lunch.

It's a good path all the way to the (hidden) house which is just below the birds' nest factories. It's home to three of the most revolting dogs around, the owner was present, he didn't seem too chuffed to see us but there' wasn't a great deal he could do because presumably like many others he's employing illegal immigrants.

If Yuehong's intention had been to exhaust Du, she had clearly failed. As we approached the main road, we saw a rare sight. It was a group of mature Malaysians out for a stroll, it's common enough in places like the Air Itam Dam but not in this area. They told me they were going 'into the jungle' and then back again, I guess the leader was consulting some GPS data!

For once the 502 bus did us proud with just a ten minute wait. Du and Yuehong went off to explore Balik Pulau while I had my dinner. Du had his first ever takeaway Nasi Kandar from Teluk Bahang and so the day as a whole must have been quite an education for him.