Penang Hills and Trails - Bukit Penara
Another Rain Gauge Challenge

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. There is a sketch map at the bottom showing the route followed. Click here for a list of the known PBA rain gauges.

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

This account is linked from my Penang Peaks page which lists peaks over 400 metres as well as other places of interest and viewpoints. To find other hikes which visit this peak please check the maps of this are using this link.

A few weeks ago, I took a fancy to 'collecting' the PBA rain gauges (RG) which are scattered around the hills above the water catchment areas. They carry numbers which makes life easier and these are, for the most part logical in relation to their positions. Having 'discovered' RG 25 the previous day between RG 24 and RG 26, today I was on the hunt for RG 33 and RG 34 which I expected to find on the ridge leading to Bukit Penara.

We needed a gentle day as we are off for the weekend in Taiping, so we caught a 502 bus to the United Hokkien Cemetery in Paya Terubong, there's a bus stop right opposite the northern entrance and that's one of the masts which were our ultimate destination today. We walked up on the right hand side, needing to find some shade on what was a very hot day.

I've kept the pictures to a minimum as we reported on this climb in some detail 3 years ago. We made a fair few mistakes that day and we were nothing like as fit as we are now. Basically we followed the motorbike concrete path, but as this winds upwards it criss-crosses these granite steps which lead to the Cheng Kon Sze (Cheng Ji Chan) known as the Temple of the 1200 Steps. Come on the right day and they will be thronged with pilgrims but today they were just covered with dry season leaf fall.

While the steps are the safe way to the top, the concrete path has several branches and there is to my knowledge only one route to the top. All the others end at houses or orchards. So if you don't know which the way is, note that this water stop is the last opportunity to use the steps. The first junction is easy as there is a house nearby to the right.

The path swings left away from the steps and I recalled that turning right at this hut back towards them had not been a very good idea. You need to go straight ahead and have the confidence to keep going - something we were sadly lacking the first time.

Maybe it wasn't as steep as the steps, but it felt like it was in the heat.

We'd never been all the way up this way, just down, and that situation does sometimes lead to problems. Not today though, as the trail got wider near a small house and a couple of zig-zags later we were on the road that continues beyond the temple to the 'Gotama Forest Buddhist Hermitage'. We'd done that one a few weeks ago, it's not on our repeat list so we turned right.

Here come the steps and opposite is the entrance to the temple. They could do with a new sign but I guess no one comes here by accident so it's hardly necessary.

The sun was now sulking behind a cloud so here's one I took earlier, much earlier in fact, about 40 years ago with my ex and a group of friendly Penang nurses. It hasn't changed at all.

We went straight past the temple and on up an inordinate number of further steps to their 'Golden Rock'. We were very careful to pay our respects to our old friend Tua Pek Kong who has been very good to us recently.

The path continues less steeply and soon reaches the road from the Air Itam Dam to the masts atop Bukit Penara. It was time for some important business. Just a few metres back down is this trail, it's the old ridge path as confirmed by the presence of these square stone markers, many of which, for a reason I don't know, have the letter 'M' on them.

I'd spotted this path some time back and was delighted with the series of stones I found, after 10 minutes I crossed this fallen tree and two stones later, there it was sit in a clearing in the forest, what a little beauty!

I don't Photoshop these numbers, each one is in a unique location and this one seems to be in working order.

One down, one to go, RG 34 had been exactly where I expected to find it and now somewhere between here and the top of the hill I confidently expected to find RG 33. Yuehong was leading the way and she had the honour of spotting it, just to the left near the road. This too was in use, I do wonder if the fact that these two are readily accessible from a tarmac road was more than a coincidence. Anyway, apart from a few with low numbers on the main hill, that's all of them accounted for and I'll post a list shortly.

We had to go to the top, it's just as boring as I had been told. However, the way the ridge and the road lie, I'm more convinced than ever that it would be very easy to come up through the jungle from the right place in the farms on the Balik Pulau side, going down was never going to be a serious option. So there it was, job done, the camera went away and almost immediately this gorgeous monitor lizard (biawak) waddled across and vanished...

Neither of us was game for anything more in the 'interesting' line so we walked down to the dam and on to Air Itam for 'High Tea'. Yuehong in particular was very tired and looked like she would fall asleep on the bus. We're taking a break for a few days now.