(Stay tuned — more bug photos coming up.)
This morning we hired a car to drive us around to a bunch of roadside attractions outside of town. The spice garden is a botanical garden that features a bunch of herbs and spice-trees as well as some exhibits about the history of spice plantations in Penang. The story is largely one of non-stop decline: Trade embargoes, poor soil, and nutmeg blight.
Our tour guide was a guy a few years younger than me (maybe more than a few years) who has just bought a bunch of cheap land on the island and is frantically planting all manner of tropical fruits to accompany the 350 durian trees that came with the land. His plan is to run a pick-it-yourself organic orchard. Regarding the durian trees, he said “When they bloom, lots of people will want to visit! And when the fruit are getting ripe, probably no one will visit.”
I took lots of photos of nutmeg trees and cinnamon trees etc. but out of context they just look like one bay tree after another.
Betel looks pretty distinctive, though:
The plaques were all written in the first person, which I enjoyed.
Pictured above is the world’s noisiest monkey. Before I picked him out from the background I thought someone must be driving a steamroller through the woods.
