Penang Hills and Trails - Rain Gauge Obsessional
Tropical Fruit Farm Explorer

This is one of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang, click here for the index. This is a shorter than average Grade 3 walk. I would like to thank Peter van der Lans for providing the route information based on his own explorations. 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.

If there are any regular readers of these pages, then they will have noticed that I have become inordinately interested in visiting the (35 known) rain gauges of Penang's PBA. This has been spurred on by a number of recent 'discoveries' and given a certain haste by our impending return to the UK. If you have difficulty understanding such a thing then you obviously weren't a trainspotter as a young boy as most of my UK generation were.

The afternoon's short walk was squeezed in between two planned normal days, Yuehong wisely opted out of it after an extremely humid day up above the Rimba Forest Park in Teluk Bahang. I don't think I've ever known a less auspicious start to a serious walk on the island, this is a bend on the round-the-island road on the Sungai Pinang side just below the summit - note the number on the signpost. It looks like a bad joke, but the abandoned electricity pole and wire is a clue that underneath the vegetation is a long abandoned and disintegrating concrete path. Obviously, it was my immediate instinct to try to follow it but it vanished into some ginger beyond which was the back end of the Tropical Fruit Farm. Instead, I followed Peter's advice and went up next to the water pipelines. This is abandoned old rubber and there was a path of sorts up through the terraces.

At least I could have a shower if I wanted one if I returned the same way as I planned. In fact following the pipes did not look like a brilliant idea as there was a much better route between them and the TFF.

Eventually I was joined by a solitary pipe as I climbed past a retaining wall at a point which which was just above the highest point of the TFF.

In fact it was to be my companion for most of the first part of the climb, by now the path was an excellent one with just a few obstructions.

Also accompanying me until I noticed was a smudge on my camera lens, not surprising given how tired I was from yesterday and how humid it was again today. After 35 minutes, I got to my first target rain gauge 23 (RG 23). Clearly it had been decommissioned.

Back into the forest I went, trees were down of course, but were not a serious problem and now the trail was not as steep as before.

Quite what the solitary forest reserve notice was doing here, I can only guess but it was metallic and much more substantial than the usual plastic junk. At one point there were trees down for the best part of 50 metres but they had been down a long time and it was easy to get over them.

There was a short descent and then as I came to another minor summit, I was joined by the detritus of the Rain Forest Children, it was now 15 months since they came this way and while the paper had gone, the plastic bag was going strong and the ink from the paper was still there too. What a bunch of greenwash shits they are, I had further non-stop reminders all the way to the end of my hike up. In fact some of it dated from a similar event in 2012. Anyway, around here, the path took a definite change of direction to the left which ties in with what I had expected looking at my copy of a terrain map.

There are some pretty substantial trees here, but their shallow roots mean that they have a very precarious existence if they grow in an exposed place on the ridge. Peter had prepared me for this path to the right and I am happy to take his word for the fact that it is no longer viable. My guess is that it once went round the side of Bukit Laksamana and is that marked as branching off from the descent from there in the direction of Western Hill - also said to be no longer viable. (Peter now informs me - January 2017 - that it leads only to a well with water pipes going down towards the Tropical Fruit Farm.) 

The path was not at all demanding and I would have happily carried on longer were it not for the fact that every metre further was a metre further to go back.  However, 40 minutes after I left RG 23, I was at RG 22.

It was definitely time for a break, not least because this rain gauge has the most spectacular view of any of the 25 I have visited so far. It was a hazy day, looking out on a bright morning must be truly amazing. Not many people see this although there is something not so different from Bukit Laksamana.

Now to my knowledge, the GPS boys haven't been here yet so I can only guess from looking at the terrain map that we were at around 550 - 600 metres above sea level. Peter has been down from Bukit Laksamana to here but the path was in poor condition and he had to be very careful as losing it would have thrown him off into a long undefined descent. However, I believe that going up from here would not present the same problem and when I am back in Penang next time and sufficiently fit, I do fancy giving it a go.

However, it was never on the menu today, it was gone 15.00 and time to head back down. I knew I would arrive at the bottom 'between 501 buses' but there was nothing I could do about that. I put the camera away and made my way down, there was never any chance that I would put a foot wrong. Now the least attractive part of the whole walk was the first 20 minutes, so when just after I passed the retaining wall I could see an entry to the top of the Tropical Fruit Farm on my right, I couldn't resist the temptation and stepped in. It was quite pretty but not up to the standard of that higher up.

The TFF had kindly provided some steps all the way down through the levels. It was a calculated risk but knowing the way Malaysians are, I was not surprised when I passed no-one on my way down and on out along the access road. I don't think it would have been a good idea to try it in the opposite direction, especially as at the time I had no idea where the required path was. Nevertheless on emerging, as I had expected, I had been walking for some 3 hours.

With more than an hour to wait for the next (last) 501 bus I really had no choice but to walk down to Teluk Bahang, after all most of it through the durians would be shady. Fortunately after about 20 minutes I was offered a very welcome lift by an old-style Penangite and his much younger wife from Perlis. Consequently, I got a much earlier bus home than I had expected.

The whole experience was very positive and interesting, holding out the possibility of doing it again properly next year.