Penang Hills and Trails
Anjung Indah South

This is one of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang, click here for the index. This is a Grade 4 walk, the middle section is undefined and full of prickly vines. 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.

IMPORTANT

As of January 2024, the route south from Anjung Indah has been blocked by a new owner with a security fence backed up by razor wire.

This account is linked from my Penang Peaks page which lists peaks over 400 metres as well as other places of interest and viewpoints. To find other hikes which visit this peak please check the maps of this are using this link.

We've been in the area south of Anjung Indah which is generally known as 'Relau' quite often, but always round the east side of the small peak. The absence of this section of the southern ridge in my 'collection' had always niggled and today we would investigate this. I have to thank Peter van der Lans who has been up here several times for getting us started which made life a whole lot easier.

The sign of a good week's hiking in my book is a bin full of empties to be recycled. We left Mavis at the car park at the top of Anjung Indah. There were stalls here pushing durians at what we would say are ridiculous prices.

Our walk started on the opposite side of the road where the rubbish tip had been largely burned and concealed under ground cover although some of Penang's lesser citizens had recently added some builder's trash.

You can see pictures of how it was nearly 2 years ago in another report. Just along the road, where we had found signs of life in the State Forestry Department with plantings of medicinal trees, the signs had vanished and the path was blocked. I dared not look to see what had happened to the project... We continued to where we would turn off for today's adventure, it's the upper of two paths which leave the road here. It was noticeable that most of the way along, the road had deep cracks on the side with the slope below, it won't last much longer.

It's in good condition and we made excellent progress. Along the way we got a new view of old friends. In the middle is the Nibbinda ridge and behind it is Bukit Elvira.

The path went into some trees and out into a small orchard which had just been cleared in anticipation of a durian harvest. The sharp curve at the corner looked to me as if it could have once been a junction with a path coming up from the concrete road below, one for another time. We were looking for a banana plantation up against the forest edge. I did wonder if this might have been it but the path continued beyond the hut.

Path perhaps overstates things but others had been this way past a small water tank and it seemed they had been heading for this small entrance into the greenery.

Time for a pause for a drink and to get the secateurs out. The 'path' went more or less straight ahead and up and soon we reached a very minor summit. The small tree on top of the boulder was some kind of land mark.

The main summit was clearly to our left and we made our way along the slightly inclined ridge towards it. By now we were doing a fair bit of snipping to avoid scratches from the prickly vines.

What appeared to be the actual summit area seemed to be covered with small trees down and we skirted it, looking for the ridge which was known to run south. We spotted a tree which had been marked for some reason, it was the only sign of human activity up here we had seen apart form just inside the forested area.

Eventually we spotted what we wanted, a clear area running down which might almost have qualified as a path except that one point we could see a mass of fallen trees across it which we avoided by swinging left temporarily. Then suddenly, the vegetation changed and we were in rubber, old rubber no doubt, but it had been tapped in living memory.

We were clearly getting places and even found my first ever horizontal rubber tree being tapped. Unfortunately, this seemed to be as far as the rubber went on the ridge.

We could have bashed on, but it was our first visit to the area and we didn't know for certain how much further the ridge had to run before it came to familiar territory. When we saw a tapper's path running down to the right, we took the easy way out.

There was nothing intrinsically difficult but it's always slow going down these terraces as we try to preserve our knees, so there was much checking left and right to find the optimum descent. Eventually, we could see some brightness ahead.

We had managed to find ourselves at the point where a stream bed came out, a happy occurrence as there were some water tanks here. It had taken us half an hour to come down from the ridge and one and a half hours to get through the forested area in all. Others would be able to do it in an hour I am sure.

And where there's a tank or two, almost always there's a path even if this one was not well used. Almost immediately, we found an abandoned hut. Around it was a fruit orchard in fair condition. If we had been here before we would have known to try following the contour left through it, as it was when Yuehong found a good trail on the other side of the house we followed that down.

We came to another hut which showed rather more sign of use and the path became wider and well used. I was a little concerned that we could hear the Jalan Tun Sardon traffic not so very far away on the right but I knew there was no unexplored path of this quality off that section. Indeed, as we curved left, the sound faded.

Ahead, I could see first a familiar rubber covered hill and then the broad concrete road we have used frequently. At the house on the junction, there were a couple of convenient chairs and time for a lunch of fruit for Yuehong and 'cakes and ale' for me. The day had gone very well.

It was too early to head for home but too late for any further major exploration. When we got to the top of the climb where ideally we would have emerged, I requested half an hour leave of absence to see whether turning left at the first hut would have been a good idea. I went up a few terraces and turned left into some well maintained rubber.

If it had continued that way, bliss... Of course, I got to a boundary and while there was more rubber beyond it was overgrown and there was the small matter of a stream bed.

Nothing terminal, I carried on and eventually came to an area which looked a lot like the old rubber we had come down through. Enough, I wasn't going to prove a point by going down to the hut and I returned whence I had come. Yuehong looked well rested.

We went down on the Relau side, we've noticed that in several places the humble jackfruit is having a good season too.

Ahead was the birds' nest factory with a new concrete road and round the corner to the left, a nasty surprise. Someone has obviously decided to put up some country houses. It may not be quite as bad as the picture implies as the durian trees have been cut back and will grow again if properly looked after. Wait and see.

We had no intention of going down to Relau so soon turned left. More bad news. this fruit orchard has been converted into a vegetable garden, as I have said many times, a totally inappropriate use for this land.

We had time to spare so we took a diversion left towards the hill which we had come across earlier. We'd only been here once before and in the opposite direction, but I did remember the walk through hut.

The path climbed upwards, this is a view east I could have done without. a hillside being ripped open, precisely the kind of 'development' which led to the disastrous flooding not much more than a month earlier. Will they never learn? This hut was the end of the concrete trail.

Isn't that beautiful? When I was first in Penang in 1972, the area to the right was paddy fields and the rest was filled with a small kampung and fruit orchards where I would hike after work at USM and look for hash trails.

Ahead the side of the hill had been cleared for replanting, last time we had come through the rubber to here but that wasn't going to happen this time...

Time was up, we went down to the red roofed hut and the masts and walked past the house which in the past has hosted the most obnoxious dog in Penang. He wasn't here last year and wasn't today, hopefully someone has poisoned the creature. Instead, we had the standard 'yappers'.

The road out had suffered a couple of bad slips, all along we could see cracks in the concrete where further slips were building up. The gentlemen on the motorbikes were trying, vainly I suspect, to fill the gaps as we completed the circle.

The days of waiting an indeterminate time for a 502 to Balik Pulau are over. We jumped into Mavis and after a curry en route we were back in time for Yuehong's swim. Sadly, some child was using the pool and she refuses to share it with anyone.