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Penang Hills and Trails - The Dogs' Home |
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This is part of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang. Click here for the index. This is a Grade 1 walk. Please visit my Penang buses page for information on accessing the starting point. We'd had a fairly long day out in the sun the previous day and this one
had to be short and sweet and preferably not too far from home. I pondered
and decided to try the walk from the top of the Relau Pass around to the
base of Bukit Jambul. Not only was it probably downhill all the way, it was
fit for the mountain bikers to judge from this report - There are two paths to the east here, we ignored the smaller one which went upwards and took the second wider path downwards. We were straight into the greenery, there were plenty of old trees here including this one wrapped in a fig with this parasitic plant.
Despite the canopy there were glimpses of views upwards to the area above Nanshan. The wide road didn't last long, it soon became a motorbike trail around the side of this house which had plenty of dogs, fortunately all were locked up.
Afterwards it was bananorama until the first junction. Never keen to surrender height, we checked out the left fork.
It didn't go very far, the dog's body language made it clear that this was a dead end. On the way back there was more evidence of the burgeoning rubber come-back in Penang.
I don't think Madam had ever been on such a path before, not a word of complaint passed her lips. Up ahead was a shed which served to prepare food for devotees at a Da Ba Gong temple ahead.
It turned out to be of the cave / rock variety, rather attractive allowing for the awning.
We now had a short rise which came to this small shed. Right and left were bananas, the right hand path went no distance and we weren't interested in going left. Just around the corner was a 3 way junction which needed more thought.
Left was dismissed as it would certainly lead to a house we could see above. I checked out the middle option but after a couple of hundred metres, the dogs told me not to bother. I was beginning to get a little concerned as the trail was less and less well used, but I needn't have worried. In front of me was a T junction, with a wide track - the picture shows our path entering right.
So I waited for Yuehong to catch up and we carried on down. Better still the track joined a cement road and here we met a very helpful young man out walking his dog. He told us how to get out and confirmed that there was no path over to USM from here.
It looked as if his house would have a good view so we invited ourselves up. As for the view it all depended which way you looked. To the right were the hills above the 'new' road to Balik Pulau with the masts at the summit.
Slightly to the left was the new Relau village, not entirely to my taste, 40 years ago this whole area was green and filled with fruit trees. Nevertheless behind you could see Bukit Papan in the distance on the left side and in the middle was the area known as The Carpet'.
"Would you like to see my other dogs too?" he asked. Now if there's one thing we are not terribly fond of (except when they are sate) then it's dogs, but it would have been churlish to refuse. Near the house were some cages full of dogs in seemingly first class condition, no less than 200 of them in all. These are not for the Korean dining table, they are strays which have been collected off the streets of George Town and which are maintained here for their natural life with donations from animal lovers. There was a lot of noise but no nasty smells, I guess occasionally a lucky one gets rehomed.
Frankly, if we had known what the rest of the walk was like, we would have turned around at this point and gone back up the hill. As it was we trudged down the hill through the trees until we came to a flat area which was mainly being used to scrap cars from traffic accidents. There was a large area full of them, it must be quite ghoulish work considering the state of many of them as most of the occupants will not have walked away from the wrecks.
There were dogs aplenty here too but they kept away from us, we went down the hill, through the open gates and found ourselves in what turned out to be Lebuh Bukit Jambul
I've no idea where all the traffic was coming from, but it was continuous and noisy. Along with the odd giant condos there were houses which seemed to be an eclectic collection assembled by various millionaires. Worse, it seems that no sooner have you built the house of your dreams than some bastard with even more money comes and builds something bigger and more tasteless right above you.
We had 2km of this before we struck Jalan Bukit Gambir and even then it was some way down to the 302 bus stop outside SMK Bukit Jambul - in fact it was the stop before the USM one we had used when we were last in the area. The whole point of these trips is to see as many sides of Penang as possible and this is one we could do without. At least for the time being the brakes have been put on the north coast developments. The walk had not taken long and we were back in town not long after 15.00. At this time the buses are not crowded and we had seats all the way on our 101s too even though we stopped in Pulau Tikus for some chores and an early tea and Island Plaza for some supplies. It's not a walk we shall be repeating but it is certainly worthy of inclusion in the collection. |
