Concur. The most memorable thing for me in Penang was the Khoo Khongsai, and I dunno if you can still see that. The Komtar Center was a negative kind of memory.

Went to LP when it was just Lao Aviation flying there. It was and is a fragile kind of place and if I went back I'd say it's probably overdeveloped already thanks to Bangkok Airways and others, but in the future it will get only much more so (same argument for going to see Angkor, BTW). A big draw with LP back then, besides all the monks and the visuals, was the ease with which you could go only a short distance for a hilltribe experience that was less touristy than the ones near Chiang Mai.