After my short trip to Singapore, I got to spend a weekend in George Town in Penang Malaysia as I was there on a business trip. It was a hot and humid Sunday afternoon and I didn’t want to just hang around the hotel, I don’t enjoy shopping, so I grabbed my camera and went hiking. I had to walk to a park across several blocks of town, which wasn’t bad except for crossing busy streets. I had to keep reminding myself that traffic flows the opposite direction of what I am used to in the US. But I eventually made it to the hiking park.

This park has hiking trails that climb a hill that overlooks George Town, see the pictures below. A lot of steep stair-steps up the hill. I met a local couple and they were nice enough to lead me up the trails to camp number 3, where there is a shaded area to rest.

Monkeys

At one point along the trail I met up with a group of Long-tailed Macaques. I think they are used to people feeding them because they kind of gathered around the trail where the people were. It was under a lot of tree cover, so had to bump the ISO to get a decent shutter speed. I kept calling at them to try to get them to look at the camera.

Panorama

I eventually got to a nice overlook where I could see all of George Town and across the straight to the mainland. So, I decided to try to get a nice panorama of the city. One thing have learned about doing panoramas with this lens is that at wide open aperture, it vignettes a bit and this really shows up when you stitch images together to make a panorama.  So I dialed down to f/8 and didn’t get any noticeable vignetting.

Below is my panorama. There were a lot of clouds in the sky. It was also kind of hazy so the mountains on the mainland in the distance are a bit obscured. The hotel where I was staying is close to the middle of the photo down by the water, so a nice hike.

I then hiked back down, and stopped at some stores that sell coffee and chocolate products on the way back to the hotel.