Penang Hills and Trails - Yet Another Jalan Chai Quickie
Building an Appetite

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 albeit with a minimal 'off piste' section.

Please visit my Penang buses page for information on accessing the starting point. Basically it would be easy enough to walk out to the starting point (and back) from Balik Pulau town but it would double the length of the walk.

It's November 2022 and apart from the recent 5 week interlude, it's been an unbelievable 32 months since we were last roaming our beloved hills. We've been here less than a week and are still at a delicate stage so a short two hour walk from the Chinese temple in Jalan Chai (west of Balik Pulau) was intended to give us an appetite for a Sungai Pinang dinner and be finished before the seasonal afternoon rain started. 

Click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the thumbnail and click on the picture to return here.

The temple remains well maintained but there were no notices or signs of organised activity. These days, the area around the 'Aquatic Farm' has been cleared. We set off towards the house in the background and just behind is a concrete path up the hill. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, a shrine has been erected among the aerial roots. For the most part, it's a 'mature' path and at each junction the main route is quite obvious, especially as it is invariably the path that climbs.

As such things go, it's not very steep and from the orchards there are views north where the rain clouds were gathering. In fact, this was a perfect opportunity to gently burn off a few calories.

Near the top of the concrete path it becomes a mature durian orchard but then it gets a little 'rough' with what looks to be overgrown rubber on the right.

Eventually as we neared the ridge we had no real path to follow. At the top we could see our ridge rising towards the Bukit Elvira area on the left.

Farmers who clear ridges invariably have to provide for water storage. In this case, the bright area on top of the hill behind Yuehong includes the 'Temple with the View'. As often happens there were large flags fluttering but they are hard to make out even in the larger version of the picture. More important today, we found ourselves at the end of what we knew had to be a new concrete path, there was no such creature in the area when we were last up here.

This was never going to be a day for 'jungle bashing' so turning right into the old rubber was out of the question. We started by walking straight ahead along the ridge and when the rubber finished we could look straight down to the valley below. It was slowly dawning on me where we were... The newly planted durians had replaced the young rubber we had gone down before - of course, at the time, there was no view across the valley. We couldn't see a concrete path, but normally one would be put in as we have often seen elsewhere, it seems to be a matter of personal preference for individual owners. We prefer the orchards we visit to have paths of course, like the one we had just left!

We returned to the junction and went down the new path, at one of the bends below we came to old concrete and looking back up, we could see where we had previously climbed the last metres 'off piste'. There were several nutmeg trees here, one was covered in fruit.

We continued down, passing a 'shrine to be' where no doubt the path builders had invested the last of the concrete for the base. This remains a classic Hakka area and outside a nearby house we found a spirit house and nutmeg kernels out drying.

I assume it is fully occupied 'in season', but today the mature gentleman was no doubt happy to escape the attentions of his wife in town and occupying himself browsing his smart phone - there is electricity here for recharging the battery. 

He remembered our previous visit almost three years ago and confirmed that his disused rubber rollers were still present. This one carries 'Imp(or)ted by 'Sime Darby & Co Ltd, Straits Settlements', a designation used prior to the Second World War.

It's an old path and very gently graded, we passed a pool which no doubt Peter van der Lans will have sampled in his time. There was no time to be tempted, it was getting more and more overcast and I was allowed to march ahead back to the car. By the time Yuehong arrived her hat was wet but not much more.

It was interesting to see the changes in the last 3 or so years and a revisit to the other side of the hill is clearly indicated to see how best now to link the two sides as it wasn't immediately obvious which of the turnings we had used when we came over before. Certainly we were able to walk over from near the cemetery in February 2020 without the need to go into the old rubber. All the best walks offer not just immediate satisfaction but raise new ideas for future explorations.