After breakfast we took the bus to Georgetown and successfully navigated down the busy streets to the ancient Chinese market we'd seen yesterday. On the way, in the bus, I saw a couple of absolutely gorgeous abandoned Colonial houses which are my equivalent of Vicki's 1930s bungalows, especially with their overgrown gardens and broken shutters and peeling paint. I was quite excited, but Mikey refused to walk the 40 minutes back for me to take a picture. The lady in the internet cafe said she thought it was 40 degrees outside, but I don't think it was that much more than 35, but the humidity was probably more than 80% which made it feel worse. Other than Palenque in April, we have never been hotter in our lives than in the last three or so weeks, and it makes last August in London feel like a refreshing spring morning.

But we found the market, which was the main thing, and Mikey led the way through as many air-conditioned shopping malls as possible. It amazes me that he can work out which exit to take to lead somewhere he's never been before even though it all looks the same, but he managed. We crossed the road via a layby filled with thousands of mopeds and avoided getting run over by trishaws and then we were in a world of old stalls and big baskets. It was a wholesaler's market so there was nothing for me to buy unless I wanted 500 onions and I just didn't have room for them today, so I had to be content to look. A lot of very hot dogs slept under cars and kittens and cats, all with short tails, ran around slowly. Mopeds with too many boxes on them weaved in and out of other mopeds with too many boxes on them.

The market was loosely organised round a central covered structure running the length of the road, but most of the visible stalls were under umbrellas or old tarpaulins outside it. We walked along the road until we got to the end, and then I suggested a detour along a lane that looked to be made by the doorsteps of rickety old houses. At the start of the road was a patch of concrete with piles of leaves on which someone had places small stones and lumps of plaster, and some large pieces of something fibrous. It was only when I was close enough to smell the chunks of drying fish and the empty fish skins that I realised what it was. We hurried on, under overhanging roofs and past motorbikes in various states of repair and black bins overflowing - we seemed to be in some sort of residential area although no-one seemed upset that we were there. There was a cage of chickens and I was surprised to see how many birds you can get into such a small space, and there were also dog-sized roosters that had boxes to themselves. I ducked through one of the houses and found myself on a little bridge (a concrete slab) over what might once have been a river but was now a stream of sewage, rubbish, wire and boxes. All the houses around had little wooden platforms over the stream and some of the platforms had kitchen equipment or armchairs on them. I went across and managed to enter the covered part of the market which reminded me of some of the cavernous souks in the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem - baskets of spices, sacks of grain, boxes with contents unknown and people running round in the dark with sack trolleys, carrying dried goods from one patch to another. It smelled of spices and dry dust, not quite cinnamon, something milder, perhaps nutmeg, and of feathers and cobwebs and of dry yellow. There were tables of flattened, dried fishes, and bowls of dried, very red shrimps that smelled bad, or at least, fishy.

And then, at the end of the market, under a tented roof, was the sound of bells and wind instruments and drums, and an assortment of red-clad people appeared far away and milled around a lot.Thinking it rude to stare, we left the market, only to be ushered in again by concerned Chinese men urging us to take photos by making little clicking motions with their fingers over their eyes. So we did, and people parted and made room for us right at the front where a man in a smiley mask and some women with elaborate hair-styles and a lot of white and pink make-up, all in red and gold gowns danced and shook and bobbed and bowed, waving fans of incence and joss-sticks, and bells and drums and horns sounded in a catchy rythmn.

No-one spoke English and no-one could explain to me what was going on, but by the bowing and incence and red, and the way things were laid out on a table like an altar - small plates of fruit and a bottle of Guinness and bowls of sand with joss-sticks in them made it seem like something religious. A large black caulrdon on a stand held sand and more incence sticks. There were two huge red, pink and gold dragons pinned to the wall behind the tables, and out on the street were enormous pink and red painted sticks burning round a pit with some fake money in it. It was all confusing but very interesting, and everyone moved out of my way to allow me to take photos. I did ask someone's permission but no-one understood until a shopkeeper just said 'It's alright,' but couldn't answer any other questions.

Satisfied that we'd experienced some real culture that wasn't in the Lonely Planet guide and that there were no other tourists around, we headed for the bus station and Penang Hill.

All we knew about this place is that there was a funicular railway going up a hill and that there would be nice views and a cool breeze at the top. We found the bus station and we were shepherded onto the right bus (it's great what looking lost can get you!). Half an hour later the driver told us we were where we wanted to be, and our guide book said it was a five-minute walk from here to the railway. Ah, but in which direction? There were, after all, several that we could choose, and we took the one most likely to be uphill. There was a very impressive Buddhist temple on the hill directly above it, and for want of a beter direction, we headed for it. We found ourselves in a market again, and the ground tilted upwards so we continued in hope. At a dead end, blocked by a rail of hanging clothes, we turned back, but the lady at the stall caught our eye and pulled back the t-shirts revealing a path, just like in a film. I was excited, so we carried on - I wanted to see where this place led! We were now indoors, or at least, there were indoor shops on the left, almost dug into rock, and the roof of the path was made of ancient scaffolding with layer upon layer of oiled canvas. A few tables on the right blocked any sunlight, and the path led up winding stairs and passageways. Every now and then someone, directly in the way of the path, would nod knowingly and point around their stall for us to keep going. Every stall sold T-shirts or plastic souveneirs, and one in about six stall-holders would ask, cunningly, 'Which T-shirt would you like to buy?' making me actually look and consider for a second before realising that I didn't want to buy any T-shirts, I just wanted to see where this road would lead.

After a while we heard the sound of a hundred school-children chanting, and then a bell rang and a few minutes later there was the noise of the hundred school-children being let out of class. More steps, it was very hot, and then there was a platform to the left. Glad to be out of the winding dark, we stepped onto a bridge and found ourselves in a circular pavilion on the middle of a small green pool. The thick water was heaving with turtles and when I realised that, I pointed into the water and said to Mikey, 'Look, turtles!' which was immensely satisfying. At the end of the pool was a wooden ramp with a dozen dull bronze turtle statues being used as a climbing frame by several hundred real ones. Then the climbing frame moved and we saw that every one of the giant reptiles was real too.

We carried on up the hill and quickly came to a building, all '70s brown and glass, with a restaurant and some souveneir shops and people lying on the floor. Through the doors at the end we saw a remarkable pagoda, maybe 20 or so feet high and suddenly we were aware of the sound of bells and drums and deep, male voices chanting. It was a relaxing sound and coming from straight above us, and while we were certainly not on Penang Hill, we'd made it to somewhere very interesting.

We were in the Kek Lok Si temple, the largest in Malaysia. It was a fairytale of Chinese-style roofs and glistening tiles, sweet-shop pastels and red edges. Unnerving swastikas adorned roof edges and mingled with arched dragons and flower beds. Up at the temple, the chanting of ten voices and dozens of bells had become the sound of two men and a different rythmn, and it was judt as loud. We had to shout to hear one another. We took our shoes off and went inside.

There were only thirteen orange-clad monks at the front of the hall, but it was filled with black-robed women, lined up, kneeling in front of rows of tables. They stood and bowed and knelt and bobbed up and down in a repeating wave, all in time and all while reading a book of strange pictograms. Up on the stage, above the chanting monks, were three enormous gold Buddhas, but the thing that most struck me was that the walls were decorated with small statues. The temple was about fifteen feet tall, 25 feet deep and 60 feet long, and every inch of the wall was covered with a small gold buddha statue in a little stone alcove. Each one of them had a tiny light above it. On the stage was a pyramid, like a French wedding cake made of profiteroles, of tiny glass jars with candles in them. There was a stall selling these pineapple-shaped candle jars to the right hand side. On a table outside were several hundred of them, all sizes, from shot-glass to bucket, all alight. A big, dragon-embellished cauldron of sand held joss-sticks. When we'd heard enough chanting, we climbed some stairs slowly and had a look at the view. We didn't fancy walking all the way to the largest bronze Buddha in the world, so we contented ourselves with a distance view.

Strangely, the walk down the hill only took a couple of minutes. More people asked us to buy t-shirts - more desparate this time as this would be their last opportunity to snare us. We resisted. Back on the ground we tried once again to guess the direction Lonely Planet meant when it said '5 minutes', to no avail. All the local shopkeepers recommended the number 8 bus, and we headed for it. A couple of people asked us if we knew the way to Penang Hill. We passed on the suggestion of the number 8 bus, and both of them said, 'But the book says it's only five minutes away, we just don't know where.'

There was a bus waiting for us just round the corner, and we found the funicular station, bought our tickets and, twenty minutes later, we crowded onto the train that would have been full with half the number of passengers. There was an unexplained delay for twenty minutes, by which time the heat and the standing and the giggling Chinese tourists next to me were beginning to affect me. The trip up the hill took about forty minutes and involved changing trains at one point, but we were rewarded, at the top, with a cool breeze. We did very little - it was 6pm on our last full day in Malaysia, so we wrote some postcards (which has become a last day ritual) and sat around for a bit. We also had icecreams and a bit of a walk, and then took the train down. Then it was a bus to Georgetown and another bus to Batu Ferringghi, and we colapsed in the coolness of the room for ten minutes before going out for supper. The hotel man had managed to get us on the 8am bus to Thailand, rather than the 4.30am one (which was a good thing) and we had a very nice meal in town. Although the restaurant was full of Europeans, which we didn't realise at the time and would have put me off, the food was very good and I was very, very full and happy going to sleep.