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Penang Hills and Trails - Relau Explorer 1 |
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This is one of a series of pages on walking the hills of Penang, click here for the index. This is a Grade 3 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. This is the first in a series of walks which build on each other as we explored the region between Anjung Indah and Relau. You may want to read the later reports after this one. Yuehong was bored, not with walking, but with Nanshan. Never mind that we had found all sorts of interesting new ways to get up to it, the fact was that we had had to go through the same bloody 6 way junction most days. So I offered her a new area above Relau for which I had found absolutely no information in my web searches, it had the southern half of the Relau Permanent Reserve at the top and probably a mixture of rubber and durians below. It also happened to have once been my favourite area for a hash run in the days before Jalan Tun Sardon carved its way right through and I walked away. Such an exploration carried a serious risk of causing a family rift as I am under standing instructions not to go into any form of jungle except that which is well defined in terms of paths and free of both mosquitoes and leeches. Rubber estate are allowed but only those with well ordered terraces and durian estates are permissible if they have proper paths. Fine, except I had no idea what we were going to face this time as I had not been into the area for the best part of 40 years... The good news though was that we could use the 502 bus and start high up at Anjung Indah. I felt we had to first check the concrete road that leads to the masts and it was not the greatest of starts as round the corner we found a large area which had been used for dumping rubbish which had then been burned. Sometimes I do wonder what possesses Malaysians to abuse their beautiful island in this manner.
Very soon there was a tempting path to the left, the masts could wait for another day (see the Relau Explorer 2). The state forestry department had recently had planted 660 'Tongkat Ali' and 100 'Asam Gelugor' trees, these are of traditional medicinal value ('Tongkat Ali' being especially useful for older men with younger wives). Having just walked past one earlier notice flat on its face, we did wonder what would be the fate of the project, certainly very few people are likely to see the results as the path onwards rapidly turned into an overgrown rubber terrace.
Worse was to come as the terrace ended up against a plastic covered wire fence beyond which was some kind of estate with concrete roads and buildings. We could have continued through a small hole in the fence but who knows how we would get out on the other side? So we went down the terraces which Yuehong hates.
Finally we were able to cut right and join a durian estate with a concrete road. This was just outside the secure estate, the padlock was very rusty and I doubt the owner had visited recently, at least through this entrance, later we found there was another entrance higher up in regular use. The electricity pole read JTS 40 15 which wasn't particularly good news as it indicated we could have got to this point much more easily from a point further down from Anjung Indah.
Effectively we had wasted the best part of an hour. We walked down the road and sure enough we came out at the 2.3km post. Fortunately on the way down we had spotted and checked a set of paths just below. We could have gone down to the house just down the road and joined them from there but a pack of dogs were obviously in residence and we went back to pole JTS 40 8, turned left and then right and headed south into the orchard. Very soon the trail became concreted and just to the right of where Yuehong is standing we found a wide trail running up the hill. While we had a snack and congratulated ourselves on finding at last the right kind of route, we had our carbohydrate 'fix'.
It was a tricky choice, in a perfect world 'up' would lead around the side of the reserve but today we needed to be conservative in our approach and headed down ('up' is effectively a dead end as we discovered later on the Relau Explorer 3 walk). Someone had spent a lot of effort to clear it, if concreted it would have happily taken a car, but it wound on round the side of the ridges and down until eventually we came to a cleared area with a birds' nest factory.
Across the valley we could see a concrete road, and we soon joined it, aiming for the hut on the other side.
Only when we got there did we find that the road finished and would continue as a path, it must also have come down from Jalan Tun Sardon, that was something else to check another time (see the Relau Explorer 4 walk). Still we could look back to the masts and we had now come quite some way albeit downhill as opposed to maintaining our height.
The good concrete path didn't last long, it soon became overgrown but we backtracked slightly and found a path up to the ridge which seemed to be another fruit orchard.
Looking down I could see a concrete path which I decided to ignore, beyond was a contrasting vista:
Slightly above us was a developing vegetable area, the hut shown was at the end of another (old) concrete path. Even if it continued slightly downwards, it was heading in the right direction. Yuehong approved.
There was just one junction. The heart said 'right', the head said 'left', once upon a time 'right' might have taken us where we wanted to go but not any more, this plantation had been abandoned. It got a lot worse than the second picture soon afterwards, another half hour was written off to experience.
So on down 'left' we went, I had put off my personal refreshment stop until we reached a point I recognised. Soon we could see a house above us, we turned right and climbed up towards it.
The Eureka moment! Yuehong didn't really believe me but it was on the road up from Relau village and time for a break. A short while later we started climbing and very soon came to the junction where right leads up to 'The Carpet'. I offered Yuehong the choice of Sungai Ara (soft option) or Balik Pulau (hard option). The former would mean two irregular buses, the latter just one so Balik Pulau it was.
This was our first serious climb of the day and we roared up it, in less than half an hour we had reached the two birds' nest factories, turned right and reached the ridge. I could barely keep up as we went down. In another half hour we were past the new gates at the bottom of the hill and a few minutes later in position for a 502 which, alas, took another half an hour to appear. Never mind, there was time for dinner of a kind and refreshment before the 17.30 501 bus.
Considering we had started from scratch it had been a very successful walk. You can read about our continuing explorations in this area.
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