Penang Hills and Trails - Balik Pulau Explorer 12
Monty Python, Penang Style

This is one of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang, click here for the index. This is a Grade 4 walk, with significant off piste elements. 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 again parked up where the 'road' to Air Itam gets more than a little steep. I had offered Yuehong the choice of the east or west sides here, but as usual she had no preference, so I nominated the former as I wanted to investigate the new concrete road going in, we are both suckers for such things now we have covered virtually all the established routes. By rights, it should have turned dry and sunny by now, but it's cool and damp and the small waterfall next to the road was in near full spate.

The landslide has been cleared but nothing has been done to stabilise things yet. The bank in the first picture supports the road and it doesn't look at all healthy to me.

We carried on up the road and took the left fork. Up at the multiple junction we found a large digger which had 'done the job' up ahead.

With the amount of rain that has fallen in Penang in the last few months, it was, perhaps, not the best time for such a venture. The concreting is not yet complete and compared to most this project looks 'lightweight', the hill slope looks rather steep for this kind of engineering. We shall see...

That's actually (very) old rubber ahead not pure 'jungle', I had wondered how far up the road would go and the answer was to the end of the electricity supply where it seems a house will be built, as can be seen the old path has been cut here. There is a house off some way to the right which shares the supply but access from here along the pole route is not that straightforward. 

Above this point the route was much as before. Dahlias are now being grown here, hopefully temporarily as there are young durian trees among them. Higher up, there are still pineapples.

Historically beyond this point, the path was overgrown but now it had been concreted over all the way up through the rubber.

I really couldn't see it going all the way to Nanshan because directly ahead is the Bukit Relau Forest Reserve. At the top of the rubber, it turned sharp right and at this point, I changed my plans for the rest of the walk so we could check it out, originally I intended to continue to Nanshan and return down the valley to our left on what we call the 'Forest Ang Trail'. Our normal route ahead was blocked by a fallen tree or two and we tried the rubber terraces to the left but as before there were lots and lots of ferns beyond. There had to be a better way and we made our way the short distance from one of the terraces into the 'forest' in more or less the usual spot. 

This is ancient rubber and, in the time we've been coming here, there's never been a proper path as such. Normally we have kept the very minor summit to our left as it is where the ferns are. The secateurs had an outing when we came to an area with a number of small trees down on the ridge. 

Eventually, I reconnected with my 'on board database', there were paths to the right and left, that meant we had come to the expected T junction. Nanshan was to the left where we could hear the pumps hard at work and Balik Pulau to the right although it's not a route I would recommend. There's a large tree down here which is my usual landmark but as the years go by its becoming less obvious.

A few minutes before, as we had come under one overhanging prickly palm, I had foolishly said "I do hope there's not a snake in that lot". Now, suddenly, there was a distinct 'bump' a couple of metres in front of me, 'something' had come out of the old tree. I found myself not so much 'face to face' as 'face to middle' with a large python, it was unmistakable being basically a slightly orange colour with the normal reticulation. They're neither venomous or aggressive, I froze and it vanished into the bush. A few years ago, Yuehong would have had difficulty resisting the urge to scream, but she too stood still round the corner, she actually had a better view than I did as it went past her. 'At least 3 metres long and thicker than your upper arm' was her verdict. It was all over so quickly that there was no time to grab a picture, it's the first live one we've seen here. Years ago we saw one in a deadly embrace with a cobra. 

We had come far enough, all I had wanted to do was confirm the continued viability of this route to Nanshan, there may well have been trees down on the rest of the link, but it was unlikely to have been severed. We turned around and found ourselves looping around the blockage, we could see that others had cleared a better route than we had used coming in. Yuehong said "This isn't the way we came", but it didn't matter because we soon found a couple of markers.

This time we simply maintained our height on an old terrace and when it finished, we had a short scramble down to the new path.

I had earlier checked the first 200 metres or so to this water tank and knew it continued further. In fact, the formal path finished at a newly cleared area.

It was easy to go a little further down to more of the same. The area behind is the Bukit Relau Forest Reserve but this is not in it. The path from the T junction runs through the trees on the other side of the valley although the last time we used it, it was not trivial to follow.

We believe in 'Never go back', especially uphill and it was reasonably clear onwards. The first wide terrace we tried to the right ended at an overgrown fruit orchard covered in ferns. So we had to continue down and soon we met a water pipe. I followed it left and got within 50 metres of durian trees and where I knew there would be a path but in between the slope looked 'dangerous'. So we followed the pipe on its increasingly erratic course downwards.

It wasn't getting any easier, but to the left instead we could see a route down to a currently cultivated area. Yuehong was indeed happy to be in the papayas especially as there was a concrete path just below.

It was not unexpected, it's one we use regularly.

We ignored the first path right and took the second one. It's several years since we came this way but after a short climb it would allow us a contour route back to the end of the road we had started on.

'Walk through' huts are a local feature, the minor concrete road finishes here and there's a house up in the trees which provided the dogs which yapped at us. We could have had more dogs if we had stayed on the road which leads to where we had met the digger. It was far more convenient to turn left on the concrete path.

For the first time today we had several hundred metres of near flat walking and as we emerged into the well maintained durians, Yuehong finally recognised where we were.

Normally, the barrier is down and padlocked but today, there was to be a delivery of building materials for the road project. The truck was unmistakably of Chinese origin, it was emitting a horrible grinding noise and lots of smoke, Yuehong commented that it would have had difficulty restarting if stopped on this road, hence the barrier's position.

So passed another 4 hour hike and since I have enough Tiger stockpiled at home for the duration of our stay, we needed only to stop off at the Sungai Pinang restaurant. It had not been our most interesting hike but meeting 'Monty' was a special highlight.