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Penang Hills and Trails 2024/5 - Paradise Lost? |
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Click here
for the full list of Penang Walks. It seems that some groups in Penang are like leopards that cannot change their spots, they can't abandon their old bad habits...
Late 2025 update ... and now they are up to their tricks again, it seems they never learn. (20th November 2025)
As time allowed, I used to roam the hills in Penang back in the 1970s, I had a day job (at USM) and a demanding hobby (steam trains) so it was hardly an obsession. These days I'm long retired as is 'steam power' and since 2010 Yuehong and I have spent the 'Northern Winter' on the island getting to know the place rather better. When we started there was little published information beyond Forest Ang's handbook for the Malayan Nature Society which covered mainly the northern hills. There were just a few reports on the web, mainly from fellow non-Malaysians. Over the next ten years, as these pages show, we got just about 'everywhere', particularly discovering the 'Fruit Orchard Trails' in the south of the island. By the time the pandemic arrived. Penangites were beginning to discover the joys of hiking beyond the inevitable Moongate Trail but since they are invariably younger than us, have jobs, and can only go out at weekends and public holidays, we hardly saw them. However, since 2020, our pleasure has been much reduced by some unfortunate developments. 1. The restrictions of 2020 / 2021 / 2022 spawned a huge interest in hiking and quiet trails which previously saw little traffic became increasingly busy. Each weekend brings more reports on the web, particularly on the semi-official 'Hiking Trails in Penang' Facebook page. 2. The PBA's policy of turning a blind eye to restricted areas such as the Fettes Aqueduct became unsustainable, the Chin Farm access route was closed which meant that key paths from the Aqueduct to Rain Gauges 17, 20 and 21 were no longer accessible. At the same time, the Tropical Fruit Farm expanded its operation southwards which cut the path to Bukit Laksamana past Rain Gauges 23 and 22. 3. The National Park now charges non-Malaysians RM 50 for entry through the main gate at Teluk Bahang, an outrageous amount considering the state of the paths in that area. 4. There has been a 'Durian Boom' which has led to much needed replanting, but also a clearance of much of the remaining disused rubber estates. Many of the older generation of (mainly Hakka) farmers who, having worked hard to educate a younger generation, have found, perhaps not surprisingly, that their progeny don't want to follow the same path. So when rich city outsiders knock on the door they feel that they have no choice but to 'take the money and run'. Equally unsurprisingly many newcomers know little about their new businesses and quite a few soon lose interest leaving ugly half baked clearances. Worst of all are those who choose to erect impenetrable fencing which blocks traditional paths across their land. There are several instances we know of, the most egregious is that on the concrete road running west from Anjung Indah just below what is now known as 'Eagle Hill'. The pictures show 'the shape of things to come'.
5. There has been a proliferation of totally unnecessary trail marking. Perhaps fortunately, my age and Yuehong's bad knee mean that we haven't experienced much of it at first hand. There are few 'jungle' trails in the south-west of the island (many of those that appear to be such actually run through abandoned rubber estates). The most significant is the one that goes from the Genting Pass along the ridge to Bukit Pulau Betong and down to Pulau Betong / Gertak Sanggul. 10 years ago it was barely passable, by 2024 with the explosion in interest in hiking, it was completely clear and with no major junctions and just access points from adjacent orchards, the last thing it needs is markers. By November 2023, the ground was clear of plastic but the trees were festooned with an astonishing variety and high density of all kinds of markers including discarded convenience food wrappers. The number of different kinds ran into double figures and in places it looked like a string of Christmas fairy lights only they didn't switch on and off. It took us several visits to return the path to its natural state, the incredible thing is that the brainless perpetrators of this 'vandalism' probably think they are following a 'green' lifestyle. This was collected on just one day from the area immediately east of the summit of Bukit Pulau Betong.
Having cleared the rubbish shown above, we returned in early March to discover that someone had remarked the trees with high quality black and yellow adhesive tape. We subsequently removed this too.
The pictures below put it in context. Note the recently added brown signs which do conform to the new Hikers' Roundtable guidelines, the new tape certainly does not!
Along the way, we visited Bukit Pulau Betong which of course was similarly decorated. The 'low point' was Bukit Long Tambang where markers were scattered seemingly at random around the peak area even though the trail is now quite clear from regular use by hikers. We also found another fresh set of markers using black paint, there were some red paint markers too; presumably the miscreants reckoned that they would be harder to remove. I do not understand why these people cannot be 'named and shamed' on the 'Hiking Trails in Penang' Facebook page.
Also on Bukit Pulau Betong we found this 'TS' (= Trigonometrical Station) dating back to colonial days which had been vandalised. Individuals are applying freelance versions of the approved brown signs to ever more minor peaks and I have now read of an official 'safe hiking' event on Bukit Papan complete with reusable markers and 120 participants; the word 'inappropriate' springs to mind. Where will it all end?
All of which may explain why we no longer post hike reports, mass hiking on this small island by its nature is not sustainable. Or, to put it bluntly, with more and more of Penang becoming a concrete jungle, we may be approaching a tipping point. And that's before you throw in the total failure of successive Penang State Governments to map out and implement a viable and sustainable development policy. To be fair, a return in early December 2024 revealed a ridge path which was almost clear of markers, lessons are being learned... Also someone had cleaned the TS above. Unfortunately later in the month, fresh pink and green string was noted along the ridge path and the summit. We soon made sure it was cleared away. It maybe tempting providence, but now at the end of February 2025, from observations here and elsewhere, I sense that the plastic tide has 'turned'; definitely there are other hikers out there who are quietly and methodically removing the excessive plastic and there is less to remove in the first place. The Hikers' Roundtable of various stakeholders in early 2024 led to a (voluntary) set of hikers' guidelines covering both casual individual and small group hiking and organised large scale events in an effort to reduce the kind of plastic pollution I have described above. In the case of events, these required that any temporary (plastic) markers deemed necessary should be removed afterwards as soon as reasonably practical. When we returned to Penang in November 2024, we soon went out for our traditional short first hike behind Pantai Acheh village. Almost immediately, we encountered numerous strips of plastic (and some direction signs) which had been put in place by 'Endurance Nature' for a large scale event in mid-October some 5 weeks earlier. Their website indicates that they had come here using what I long ago dubbed the 'secret garden' trail which starts at a corner on the round-the-island road between the Tropical Fruit Farm and the Boulder Valley Glamping site. Potentially there would have been hundreds of such strips of plastic. We removed a couple of dozen of them until we turned off about 200 metres later. They were still there a month later although we found that the path at the other end had been cleared. Again, we have ensured that the path is once again clear of this detritus.
The amazing thing is that the same group had been guilty of a similar 'offence' along exactly the same section back in 2019. When I raised it at the time, I received an acknowledgement of their failure and an assurance that it would not be repeated. It seems that this is a group of leopards that cannot change their spots. 'Disappointed' doesn't begin to describe my feelings. They had another event announced for February 2025, their card was 'marked' and I vowed to monitor their performance although they have said it would be largely GPS based. I am not sure whether the event actually occurred then (or later) but we never detected any associated trail markers. For some reason I can only begin to guess, for their early October 2025 event they did not visit Pantai Acheh (village) as usual and consequently when we did our traditional early season walk there in November 2025, we found no plastic at all. Good riddance, I say! However, a couple of days later we joined the classic Pulau Betong <==> Gertak Sanggul path at the Pulau Kendi viewpoint and this is what we found, (click on a thumbnail), it had appeared in the last few days as we had passed this way twice in the week beforehand. It was the usual culprits, we did the necessary and the picture on the right shows what we collected on the descent to Gertak Sanggul. There was even a 'confession' on a post at the bottom. It claimed that the markers would be removed at the end of the event on the previous Sunday. In the light of what we had found, that sounded like a bad joke to me! I fired off yet another email to the chief organiser but, unlike the previous year, he did respond, apologising for 'missing' so much and stating that any remaining plastic (i.e. that beyond where we had first found it) would be removed by the following weekend.
It seems that the event also passed through the Genting Hill Resort, I checked that a couple of days later on my own as Yuehong's new knee isn't up to that sort of route just yet. It seems that after they got to Pulau Betong, they climbed up to the ridge from near the Hakka Centre area as the markers suddenly finished on the ridge. They will have had a busy weekend here too!
I'll be back to check on progress in due course, but I've now been told that the remaining plastic has been cleared (20th November 2025). Click here to return to the top of the page. |
