Penang Hills and Trails - The Haunted House 2019 Part 2

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. 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 had been to the same area 4 days earlier and climbed to the 'Haunted House'. Now we were back with the intention of following the 'medium run' of what had been the 1000th run of the Penang International Hash Hounds. As a result the two reports are interlinked somewhat.

The following two pictures were taken on the first visit and show the starting point which is behind the Tenby School in Tanjung Bunga. The trail from here to the landslide in the Sungai Kelian valley is covered in our first report and there is a link back to this report..

This is a general view of the landslide which occurred in May 2018. Not surprisingly, most of the soil appeared in Tanjung Bunga and was washed into the sea. A newspaper report at the time said it 40m x 20m but it is many times bigger than that. 

The landslide swept away the original path and we were directed up and around it, those who had chosen the short run will have picked their way across the base. From near the top, we got a grandstand view, even after a year and a half little has grown here which probably indicates that soil is still being washed away.

We passed uncomfortably close to the edge and instead of going back down, we maintained height.

Very soon, the paper veered to the right and started to climb again. The runners will not have known that they had to lose all that recently gained height, but we did.

We reached the pipeline at a point where we had not seen it before. The paper went left which was an enticing prospect.

We followed the pipeline down until we got to the junction with the valley path. We had been to this point before when we hiked to the end of the accessible part of the valley.

However, this time we turned left and went back down towards the landslide. Just before it we came to a mass of paper which marked the point where we rejoined the short run and would start to climb again.

I much prefer ridges to valley sides in Penang. Here we started comfortably but soon we met the first boulders of the day.

From experience there is never an easy clear route through such creatures. First up was a gap which would have been a tight squeeze for some of the anniversary hash runners.

Yuehong has shorter arms than I do and this was quite challenging.

Fortunately that was as bad as it got and the remaining boulders were smaller and spread out.

The path leveled out and then gently sloped up to the junction we had been to on our previous hike. This bit of plastic like the others at previous junctions was carefully removed. otherwise they would have comfortably outlasted the paper.

We knew it wouldn't be too far to the main path. Whereas above we had been faced with a 'boulder valley' this time we could hear the stream under the small rocks.

Just below is what is known as 'living water' where the stream comes to the surface and the signs left by well meaning but ultimately ignorant morons still littered the place. We quickly moved on and in a couple of minutes we hit the main path.

If you want you can read about the descent to the starting point. We'd enjoyed the hike up till now, the rest was the price to pay for it.

It's not an area we are likely to return to in a hurry, not only is the main path to the Haunted House a turn off but you can never really escape the sound of the building works going on down below.