The International Steam Pages


Penang Hills and Trails - Two Waterfalls
Air Itam Dam to Titi Kerawang

This is part of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang. Click here for the index. This is a Grade 3 walk based on distance covered although the terrain is not difficult. 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 actually again used the path up from Air Itam to the dam. I've often mused about the current necessity of this sign at the start of the walk. We had picked December 8th 2012 for a visit to the dam, as it was its 50th birthday. Malaysians on average having no sense of history, it was just as well that we brought our own birthday cake

Yuehong asked to walk along the west side for a change:

It was one of those days where we had no definite plan, and the choice of side indicated that we should take the first right hand turning which I knew from Forest Ang's book and website would take us up towards Tiger Hill. I had no intention of going that far as it would imply having to take the Hill Railway Train down which costs multiple beers for non-Malaysians. It's impossible to miss the turn, it's guarded by a gate on the main dam road and there's a 'temple sign' indicating it.

It's an extremely good track to walk if you're not in the first flush of youth, it's quite shady and well graded as it first follows a stream and then zig-zags to gain height and then rejoins the stream next to a small waterfall. Near the bottom is a rain gauge (35 is painted roughly on it although it does not appear on a recent list I have seen).

Now if it weren't for the fact that this is a catchment area, the pool above it would be a great place to cool off. It being a Saturday, there were several bikers coming down from Penang Hill, the only other traffic being a couple of motorbikes and this monster which was ferrying building materials.

In what seemed like no time at all we reached the 5 way junction at the col between what the hill to the south-west of the dam and Tiger Hill (all of which is part of the Bukit Kerajaan Forest Reserve of 2286 Ha according to the signs). The forest trail to the left leads back to the Air Itam - Balik Pulau 'road' and the forest trail to the right leads to the Tiger Hill Valley as we confirmed later (neither is visible in the picture). Forest Ang suggests, without giving detail, that the left fork going up here also leads to Titi Kerawang (we now know that this is incorrect), but we took the right fork leading down to the valley below as it was signposted for the temple. On the way down we passed two more junctions and each time took the right fork as indicated by the signs.

As it turned out this was a good choice, the track descended gently and wound round the hillside till we got to the temple, it's another to Tua Pek Kong (Da Ba Gong Lian Jiao Yuan). This area is over the watershed and hence partly cultivated  This temple must be the most remote and inaccessible of any on the island.

Fortunately, the track continued beyond the temple although it was soon much narrower as we found ourselves in a mixture of old rubber estates, secondary jungle and durian orchards. Round one corner, we suddenly found ourselves among more than half a dozen walkers some of whom had a plastic ID round their necks proclaiming 'Hare'. This looked awfully like hash by committee to me as we never used more than 2 or 3 in my day, but when we met a second smaller group we found out that they were the 'sweepers' for the day's 3rd Penang Rainforest Hash Challenge (http://ph4.me/ link dead by 26th April 2014) which involved a masochistic 28km 'run' from Balik Pulau to Teluk Bahang. We could have followed their paper back to Balik Pulau but that sounded a long way round to me at the time, we certainly weren't going to join it in the other direction! I think they were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Just in case we were in any doubt as to being on the right track, we found that someone had helpfully erected a signpost to Sungai Pinang. Yuehong was enjoying herself, it was great walking and a week off in Sumatra had not blunted our fitness levels:

The best durians were tied to the trees, but such was the glut that the lesser fruits were just left hanging and as usual we sampled so many 'rejects' that we found we had lost our durian lust. As chief bank manager, I am not displeased at this. A new fruit for our walks was nutmeg, it is the seed in the middle about 1cm across which is needed.:

Looking back there were many glimpses of rain forest on the hill tops although it was long gone from where we were. Looking down, we had a new view for us, this being Kuala Sungai Pinang:

Finally we could see the round-the-island road below us, there were just a couple of zig-zags left and a park for tired motorbikes - the locals being traditional Chinese peasants for the most part - and we were out.

The JKR has helpfully erected a mass of signs and this is right opposite our exit, (the 6 is the road number, the 41 indicates the distance from George Town in km measured clockwise, and the 396 is the number of metres from the last kilometre stone) just a few hundred metres below Titi Kerawang where we spent a couple of minutes sharing the waterfall with the weekend tourists before catching the 501 bus which had left Teluk Bahang at 16.00 (it would be 16.15 from February 2013). That gave us an hour in Balik Pulau to buy a mountain of cheap rambutans and take a much needed rest, Yuehong was deliberately annoying me as I had refused to allow her to eat all 3kg of rambutans before taking the 17.30 501 bus back over the hill. Dinner was a standard 'nasi kandar' at Teluk Bahang before we took the 101 bus home.

This is a splendid walk, but just like the 'Garden in the Sky' walk from Paya Terubong to Balik Pulau, it really has to be done in the westerly direction as trying to pick the right path going in the opposite direction would be a mug's game. However, some time later we did sort this out and you can read about how to do the ascent to the temple here.


Titi Kerawang Area

Key:

 ____ = Concrete Road

 ____ = Path

 ____ = Easy 'Off piste'

 ____ = Seriously 'Off piste'

(Not all paths are shown, there are many more
which are seasonal or just go to houses.)

Click here for information on the maps.


Rob and Yuehong Dickinson

Email: webmaster@internationalsteam.co.uk