Penang is a place that Craig has spoken of highly and so from our Chrissy holiday in Perth we flew here with a quick overnight in KL. We had already explored Kuala Lumpur before the detour down under.

Penang is all about the food. They take street food to a new level and give it Michelin ratings! We had lunch of Hainanese chicken and rice at a Michelin rated restaurant for 45 RM (£8) for all 4 of us, including drinks. It was amazingly delicious! Penang is helping to transform our normally beige food only eating children into gastronomics (well, sort of!). Phoebe especially has embraced many new food adventures.

George Town is the multicultural capital of the island of Penang and is a Unesco World Heritage City. It is full of character with British colonial buildings covered in street art, Chinese shophouses and mosques. The largest ethnic group is Chinese followed by Malay and Indian and the multiculturalist society enables religions to practice alongside each other. This is reflected in the vast array of food on offer – we ate so many things including Malaysian noodles, as many roti as we could eat, Chinese dim sum, Indian samosas. Despite the photo none of us were brave enough to try the frog porridge! Then there was the part where I got sick and vowed never to eat street food for the rest of my life (now, a week later I am nearly getting over this idea!) 

Beyond the old town, George Town is a modern city with skyscrapers and shopping malls and the girls did a load of fun things including cat and dog cafes, which seem to be expensive cafes where you can stroke the owners pets (potential next business idea?!). The rest of our planned sightseeing fell to the wayside due to my temporary downfall!

From Penang we needed to plan where to head next on the tour and with Chinese New Year on the horizon we decided to skip most of South East Asia and head further East to Taiwan from Bangkok. So, the next step will be to travel north by train to Thailand!