A trip to Penang over the weekend - Pt II

It early on a Saturday morning. However, I didn't want to take any chances with traffic, so I left early. There was some "upgrading" construction on the Penang bridge, but it did not affect traffic like on the PLUS highway.

I dropped my wife, mother and sister at Queensbay Mall and headed for my supplier's office. Spent the rest of the day working out some of the bugs and add in "last-minute-user-input" also! By the time I was done it was mid-afternoon already.

When I got home, I notice that my front left tire was flat. Due to the extensive soundproofing and Autofoam on my Civic, there was no telltale sign or noise that my tire was flat. I'm not advertising, but this is my experience. If you're wondering where I mod my Civic, it's at KL Auto.

Just drove as normal. Fortunately, from the look of the tire, it must have just happened, as the tire rim was still intact and the tire rubber too.

Tough luck - scratch one off the list

There was a tire shop just outside that was still open. However, they didn't have the same brand of tire that I was using (205/55R16 Yokohama DNA dB ES501), so I am now running with an odd Bridgestone tire swapped to the rear left to minimize impact on handling due to mismatched tires. Gotta make arrangements to fix this when I get back to KL....

Front left a little sunken....


The compact spare looks funny. Being smaller than the standard tire, you're not supposed to go faster than 80kph with this on....

At the tire shop, found a 1-inch tear in my tire. When they tried to inflate the tire, it deflated completely within 5 seconds. That was a really large hole torn into the side of my tire (right at the edge, where the tire surface meets the sidewall). Don't know what could have caused such massive damage....

Well, that night, we decided to take dinner at Gurney Drive, which was located on the North Western coast of Penang Island. That required crossing the Penang bridge again, and that was where we got stuck in yet another traffic jam. Right after the toll booths, all of the lanes converged to a single lane on the bridge. Reason? A short distance ahead, a car had broken down on the right lane, hence all traffic had to squeeze through the left lane. Imagine 8 to 10 lanes converging, and competing with over-zealous drivers, buses and lorries....

The quality of the photo is poor. Wish I had my SLR with me. Had to make do with my Sony Ericsson W810i....


Hawker foods galore! All sorts of food available from the many stalls.

Due to lack of parking, had chosen (poorly) to park in the basement of the nearby Gurney plaza. That turned out to be a big, big mistake, because when it was time to leave, there was (yep, you guessed it) a bad traffic jam all the way from the basement level 2 floors below right up to the exit. By the time we got to the exit, it was an hour later (parking ticket expired already, but the guard let us out anyway. I guess they're used to this already).

Down here also traffic jam?!

As if crawling slowly out of the basement wasn't bad enough, we had to contend with inconsiderate queue jumpers and horn-loving motorists! That last group was pretty annoying, and quite amusing too. Imagine, all the cars are stuck. Some impatient guy starts honking. Suddenly, by coincidence, the cars just start to move (but stop soon after). The feeble human brain may register a false co-relation between honking and getting cars to move. Immediately, EVERYONE starts blasting their car horns...! Once again, extensive soundproofing on my Civic saved the day!

That was the last notable traffic jam encountered during my 3 day trip to Penang. Though it wasn't a public holiday or anything, it was during the School holidays, so that may have accounted for the extra traffic on the roads.

So, imagine, set out for dinner at 8.00pm, got home only at 12.00am....

[ ... End of Part II ... ]