What to do with your one day off for the week:

1. Walk into town, and jump on a 302 bus.

2. Find out that, contrary to your firm belief, you cannot use your KL Touch 'n Go card on Penang buses...

3. Scrabble round looking for the 8 ringgit you need to take two people to Batu Maung.

4. Trundle down the east coast of the island, wondering whether quite so many high-rise condos are really what Penang needs.

5. Realize, when you reach Batu Maung, that you don't really know where the Penang War Museum (your first objective) actually is.

6. Pop into an Indian place for a teh tarik while you work it all out.

7. Discover that if you'd scrolled down to the bottom of the Travelfish entry, you'd have realized that they talk about a "steep 20 minute uphill trek" to the museum, and advise taking a Grab from George Town...

8. Find out that the "steep 20-minute uphill trek" is a total over-statement, and is more like a 10-minute walk on a slightly sloping paved road.

9. Wonder again about the huge buildings that are going up at the bottom of the rise...

10. Explore. The museum is the old Penang Fort, built by the British in the 1930s with the aim of defending Malaya, and then -- possibly -- used by the Japanese as a fortification and/or prisoner-of-war camp. You can wander round pill boxes, ammunition stores, command centres, reputed execution sites, and a variety of barracks. As Travelfish warns: "Dont expect slick displays or a guided tour." But the buildings are amazingly intact. For good or ill, the museum exploits its reputation as one of the 10 most haunted places in Asia by running night-time ghost tours, and some of the accoutrements for these I found a little distracting. Overall you come away with the line between evidence and hearsay a little blurred. Nevertheless, it's an interesting and sombre place, which reminded us of our Okinawa and Corregidor experiences. Whatever the precise history of its use, it certainly seemed to do little good, which might be an object lesson for our troubled times.

















11. Trudge down the hill, and pop into the nearest F&B outlet, which in our case turned out to be a little Vietnamese place at the bottom of a still-empty mall-and-condo complex. The fried rice and pan-fried tofu dishes were very acceptable, but the piece de resistance was the Vietnamese coffee. Let it drip through into the condensed milk, stir it up, and you have something that tastes like the coffee soft-centre from the chocolate box of childhood memory.

12. Walk just a little further to the Sam Poh Kong temple. The large indentation that looks like a footprint is the key curiosity (and, depending whether you're Chinese, Malay, or Indian, you'll have a different explanation for it -- the Chinese one is that it was made in the 13th century by Zheng He, to whom the temple is now dedicated). But best of all is the breezy view of the sea and the boats, bobbing vigorously in the surprisingly choppy sea.











13. Catch the 302 home, and try not to get too impatient with the Sunday traffic.

A day well spent. And a good reminder of the fuzzy, shimmery line between history and legend.