Hiking to Penang hill thru lily pond

This is my first full backpack training to Penang hill as a preparation to the coming tahan expedition in Feb 2012. This time we have chosen quite a challenging jungle trekking trail to go up to Penang hill through lily pond and the old Craig hotel. It was quite tough in the beginning and towards the end where it's slope is quite steep. Also we need to go through quite a lot of bushes that the leaves may cause a lot of cuts and scratches on your skin. It's better to wear long sleeves with tracksuit to minimize this as much as possible. We managed to reach the peak in 3hrs 30mins.

We tried the food at the newly opened food court at the peak and we were all surprised to see that the food an beverages were actually being separated into different floor. The top floor were flooded with all the food stalls and all the beverages were located on the floor below it. It makes us feel so inconvenient that we need to order food in on floor then take it all Te way down to the other floor to get the drink. Furthermore they are practicing self service where we need to get the food ourselves. A more funny thing is that the shopkeeper cannot even come out to the place where we sit to chat with the customers. So even we are just siting 1meter away from the stall, they still need us to go to the stall to pick up our food. That's ridiculous.

After taking the lunch, we went back down to botanical garden thru the normal tar road thru 84 and the staircase at 46.

It was a great work out to prepare ourselves for the coming tough tahan hiking expedition!