Ok food, cheap DVDs and 11 hours to Thailand

Lets recap the last few days. Last Saturday we headed from KL to Penang. Penang is touted as being one of the most visited places in Malaysia and with all the hotel build up we can see where all these people stay. What we don't really understand is why people come here. The main city, Georgetown has a few really old buildings, an average Chinatown, a little India but not much really going on and was a bore. The outskirts have a lot of hotels and restaurants around the beaches which in our opinion are NASTY!!! We stayed at a small no-name guesthouse in Batu Ferrenghi (the most popular beach on the island). The guesthouse was pretty decent for the money and Boon, the guy running it was friendly. The beach and water though was really bad. We are a bit spoilt coming from Australia and all but wow, what a crappy patch of sand and water... You can even see sewage and storm water run-off streaming its way right into the water (while people are sitting in beachchairs and swimming about 2 metres away!!). Overall a disappointing visit and we felt that those 3 days we spent there would have been better spent elsewhere.
Penang did redeem itself slightly as the food was inexpensive and pretty tasty. Lots of Chinese food due to the large population of Chinese on the island. Penang is also, HANDS DOWN, the cheapest and easiest place to buy bootleg DVDs. We're talking about $1.50 AUD (4RM) per DVD (or 11 DVDs for $15 if you know the going rate). The same stuff was on sale in KL for about $4.00 per disc. Whats even better is that the people running the stalls at the night markets aren't as pushy and "in your face" as they are in KL.
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Penang's lack of action, the low price of DVDs and the fact that our room at the guesthouse did not have a TV "motivated" us to buy a portable DVD player which we will happily carry about for the rest of our trip. It wasn't too expensive but was still a splurge on our account. Its nice though as it plays everything, DVDs, CDs, DivX and has an SD and USB slots. It can even play out to an ordinary TV. We likes... We also bought about 24 DVDs to go with it.
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Today we left Penang for Krabi, Thailand!!! We had to take two minibuses and the whole trip took 11 hours. We're glad to be in Thailand now... Its going to be beaches and sunshine for the next 10 days or so before we head to Bangkok. Tomorrow we're heading to Railay beach.

- Uriah and Derek