Penang Hills and Trails - Sungai Pinang Fiasco
Sungai Pinang to Nowhere and back again

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. 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.

See also the Sungai Pinang Horseshoe Part 1, the second part of which covers the same area.

The 501 bus service needed to get to Sungai Pinang from the north of the island had been withdrawn by September 2022. This makes this hike impractical for anyone without the use of a car.

Now and again, we all have a bad day at the office which we can't blame on any one but ourselves. If I could have been bothered to check that we needed to turn at electricity pole JPA 32.35 on the road up then we would have saved ourselves at least half an hour messing around before we finally got it right. I know better than most that going down looks very different from going up especially when you have only ever used a path once nearly a year before...

Anyway, the original plan had been to find a traverse on the east side of the upper valley above Sungai Pinang and then go down the hill to Pantai Acheh the hard way (Pantai Acheh Descent February 2013). Sungai Pinang is slowly being dragged into the 21st century, up to now developments have come mainly along the round-the-island road but this was a fenced off area on the Pantai Acheh road. When you consider that minimum wage jobs pay about MYR 1000 a month, you wonder who, if anybody, in the village might be able to afford houses like this. Better to see in this area are several community WiFi masts, my understanding is that the signal reaches up to about 100 metres although I guess you'd need a very good modem / smartphone of you own to work it properly at that distance.

We walked out until we came to our turn off, the two pillars are a pretty good landmark. When we got to our correct turning, it didn't look quite right to me.

Half an hour or so later we were back again, within a couple of minutes we knew we were right at last and we took the first left at the bird's nest house.

I was looking for a path on the left to get into the next estate which was being cleared during the earlier part of the year. The first sandy path didn't look up to much (I later confirmed that it died in about 100 metres). The next left also went a short way and finished at a house. So we had to go right.

This brought us to a crossroads which we recognised so we went left knowing we were heading for the ridge. There were no other paths on offer as we climbed.

The only hope now was that we would able to follow the ridge and at first it looked a possibility. Then the path became less and less used and eventually there were ferns. To compound our bad day, Yuehong had a sore knee and common sense said to throw in the towel and return to base. (We need to check out the continuation when the ferns have died back a bit during the dry season, it's probably only a couple of hundred metres to the next cleared area, Peter van der Lans has done it).

We have since done this in 2022 (through overgrown rubber to the left) and in 2023 (straight on through the ferns). Neither was either difficult or 'fun', probably the latter was easier at the time.

We had one more card to play. We had seen another path coming up on the east side of the lower valley from Sungai Pinang and that might provide a pleasant alternative descent. There was a path to a house at electricity pole JPA 32 31 so we tried that. Beyond the house there was a stream below then some scrub, another stream and a durian estate. Yuehong crossed gingerly.

The second stream had a long abandoned bridge but the camera decided to delete the pictures of it. Beyond there was a shot climb till we met the other path which would lead us down.

It was a very attractive alternative to the road up eventually becoming a road itself.

We passed the Saanen Dairy Goat Farm (and Tourist Centre) and then the National Service training camp.

The road was shady and again to be preferred to Jalan Pantai Acheh. It came out about 100 metres from the bridge at Sungai Pinang.

So the day was not entirely wasted, we had a new route up the valley if only we can find out how to connect it with the other paths. We had missed the 14.30 501 by quite a while so we relaxed in Sungai Pinang before catching the 404 to Balik Pulau where we relaxed a little more before taking the 17.30 501 bus home.