Penang Hills and Trails - Brothers Bungalow
Another Middle Station Loop

This is one of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang, click here for the index. This is a longer than average 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.

We repeated the first part of this walk in December 2017 with Mike Gibby as he had never been in this area. At the time, the road to the Air Itam Dam was still closed following storm damage so we couldn't start there. Instead we took Mavis (the Myvi) up to the small temple at the road junction where we parked up. Unfortunately, there were two considerable landslides on the contour path described below in 'It undulated a little, there are several junctions along it, but all go clearly up or down and were to be left for another time.' These were best described as 'passable with care' but they added to the journey time to the Middle Station where I wanted to inspect the work going on to restore the railway after a major landslip in November 2017. I'm not sure if this path will get mended, it's not heavily used and then mainly I suspect by hikers and bikers, nature will remove the trees in due course. 

As for the railway, the incident happened at the (new) passing loop and as this was the only place where the railway was widened during reconstruction it must be likely that the works destabilised the hillside - after all trains had run past it for 80 years before. The large boulder which landed on the track bent at least one rail but fortunately this cushioned the fall and the cable was apparently undamaged. There are initial pictures of the clearance on www.anilnetto.com where hard hats and safety precautions are not at all in evidence. By now the track was clear and damaged rails were being changed, the cars were presumably at the end stations and the pulleys through one side of the loop were 'out'. The bank had been tidied and steel reinforcement netting and drainage pipes added, steady progress was being made concreting the whole, only time will tell if this will prove to be sufficiently strong without any proper anchoring. Officially, the Penang Hill Corporation had been aiming to get the railway re-opened before Christmas (2017!) but a later report in a local paper said that they were waiting for necessary spare parts. Judge for yourself from the pictures (taken on 18th December 2017) whether this is optimistic. In the medium term, those dead trees (and their roots) will be rotten in a couple of years time.

The security notice from the PHC is a bad joke, there are plenty of pictures on the web, the authorities are needlessly twitchy; if working standards are demonstrably high, what have they to fear?

Personally, I think the fact that more damage to the railway's infrastructure was not caused is a sign that the engineers involved in the reconstruction had generally done their job well.

Friends Nathan and Tom were desirous of being shown some of the paths at the lower level of the main hill facing Air Itam. I wanted to confirm I could find a trail which I had used coming down just once before. Yuehong just wanted a comfortable walk before a planned Chinese New Year assault on her overindulgence in North Sumatra.

The great benefit to us of this walk is that we were offered a lift directly to Air Itam so that the journey which would take the best part of two hours by bus would be accomplished in about half an hour. We parked up beyond Kek Lok Si and took the path described briefly in one of our early walks. Basically look for the road signposted to "KWARN INN SAHN POW YIN SIAN TSI(P)" on the right, don't take the turn to that temple and then just keep going up it until you have a small temple on your right at a road junction. We didn't go through the shelter, but went up the road Yuehong is standing on and very soon turned right at electricity pole 9 34.

I had come down here dog tired at the end of a very long hike, I had noted the key junctions along the way, but I was very conscious that going up might look rather different... As expected, there was an early junction on the left but it was so overgrown we could have missed it, not that it mattered. Soon we entered a cleared area which a group of Indonesians are using to demonstrate how to ruin a perfectly good hillside. The place is a mess for the most part and the hut contains enough agrochemicals to poison most of the population of Penang. Above the hut was the first critical junction. Ahead was more concrete but we needed the counter-intuitive minor trail to the left.

There was time for a last look back at beautiful Air Itam before the path plunged into the undergrowth. Nathan and Tom were apprehensive as I have a long record of enticing them on to dodgy paths. We could see the Lean Fah Thong temple below, somewhere we had visited some time ago and been told there was no way out above. Given there was a cleared area in that direction, that was one to check out, but not today.

Soon we came to the second critical junction as we emerged into another cleared area, at this point we had to turn right. The main climb was over and this was a section which I was sure Yuehong would enjoy as broadly it followed a contour along the hillside.

It undulated a little, there are several junctions along it, but all go clearly up or down and were to be left for another time.

Eventually the path dropped down slightly and then we were at the junction with the direct path up from Air Itam. I don't like it because it's steep, boring and has almost no shade but it's fine if you are in a hurry.

Just round the corner is a small temple with, according to your preference, a marvellous view of Georgetown or a panorama which demonstrates what a mess has been made of the place in the last 30 or 40 years. As I tend to the latter, you'll have to go up yourself to see it. We paused for refreshment and consulted our guests as to what they would like to do next. They asked to go up to the Brothers Bungalow  Now I had promised Yuehong a short walk and she had eaten accordingly, so I granted her an hour off.

To get to our next destination we needed to turn left, we would go straight on when we returned. I confessed that I had only ever been down this route and when we came to a Y junction, I had no idea which was the one I had used. I chose left because I had heard that there were actually two paths from the area on the bungalow and an excellent path it was..

However, it wasn't the path I had used. Eventually we came to a small house and it was obviously part of the Brothers  Bungalow complex.

Never mind, there was a path to the right and we soon got to the road which would have taken us to the main hill had we so chosen. I took the opportunity to photograph our destination for the day although it would have been rude to barge in.

So we went up the road till we came to the required junction, turned right and were soon back at the junction which had confused me.

So back we went to collect Yuehong, I had the rest of my liquid lunch and asked Yuehong to guide us to the Middle Station but unfortunately she hadn't been this way for a year and had forgotten that the rule was 'if in doubt, follow the contour'. Nearer the station I knew to go slightly right and down.

Nearby a couple were attending to their devotions at the foot of a huge tree that may well date back towards the time the railway was built. I'm a sucker for trains and we had to wait for a few minutes for one to come past going uphill. As this is just below the passing loop,. immediately after we had the other one coming down. The original Middle Station winding house is no closer to becoming a museum as planned. I cannot understand why it can't be opened to the public on occasional Sundays. For some pictures of the interior see the promotional page for a DVD I made of the railway just before it was modernised. We climbed the steps beyond at the start of the next stage of the walk.

I was feeling a bit sleepy and was happy to let Yuehong take charge as we went along the last flat section of the day. Soon we hit the zig-zags through the very old rubber and nearly new stupas.

You can't go wrong from here. Ahead leads to the Hye Keat estate, today we were to turn right to the Bat's Cave temple on a more direct route down. Coming up needs a little care - it's described in detail for a walk which also loops through the Middle Station.

As it has been raining rather a lot lately, the small waterfall was livelier than usual but the little boys who usually bathe here must have been in school. The PBA would rather they didn't as below is a water intake point, but I suspect the agrochemicals washed down are far more of a threat to health than anything the youngsters might add to the water.

All we had to do now was catch a 204 bus back to the middle of Air Itam where the car had been left and head for home. This is a lovely walk and really opened the eyes of our guests to the possibilities of this area. Previously they had tried to find a direct route down from the Middle Station and that, as they discovered, is hard going.