A PASSAGE TO INDIA: 245. PENANG, IPOH REVISITED

From Penang, to bus across a bridge into Perak state takes a little over an hour, stopping at the state capital of Ipoh and its other town of Taiping. The latter, I had the good fortune to explore on previous visits. It's a retro town that's full of solid colonial buildings and art deco old buildings waiting for a new coat of paint. Another fabulous town is the royal capital of Kuala Kangsar. My sense is, in the very near future, the 2 towns of Taiping and Kuala Kangsar have the potential to be designated UNESCO heritage and cultural sites - pretty much like Georgetown and Malacca...they're still charming sleepy hollows but for most governments and tourism bodies, a UNESCO accolade is to die for and translates into tourist dollars...

From the coach window, a few decent shots of the buildings I was referring to, with a new coat of paint. On a previous visit the red and white Fire Station was a mouldy greyish white, a little forlorn...

This colonial era clock tower was erected to commemorate Queen Victoria over something or other. I like that Malaysian old towns especially those up North, have a good number of clock towers that were never demolished. In the case of this one, a yellow dome was added, to claim Malay/Islamic 'origins' and dilute it's British colonial past...

I noticed right away the dome's a more recent addition...

The Royal Ipoh Club below (1895). We have in SG a good many similar colonial residences that are well preserved, all beautiful...

Kellie's Castle, Batu Gajah, Perak - a relic leftover by a Scotsman, a civil engineer, rubber planter, tin miner - for some unknown reason, the mansion was abandoned and left to rot...and for some unknown reason, this is my 3rd attempt to try explore this place but was unsuccessful (again) but it's the closest I've come to this building, viewing it from the coach...

Perak state is fringed by hills with rain forests making the towns one of the wettest in the Peninsula, mornings can be shrouded in mist...

In Penang, I hung out in Balik Pulau. It's going back in time. It's where the durian feasting took place. The folks here will have you know, the best durians in Malaysia are from here. The folks in Bentong, another outback town, claim the same thing. They keep coming up with more and more fancy varieties with sexy names. It's all durians to a plebeian like me...

Let the stuffing begin...! This is the 1st round...by the time we're done, we are in a durian coma...nobody recalls which variety they had or didn't...

Partner in that stuffing, after which we adjourned for lunch, believe it or not, but agreed to share a small bowl of their famous Penang sourish laksa - it was super, much better than some places I've tried before...a pity I couldn't 'stuff ' more into me to make its taste memorable...!

Spot the snake...

On previous visits, I had a good look at the various wall art that's all over Balik Pulau. They're in my other posts. This place is away from the touristy parts of Penang. I stayed in Georgetown this time and it's away from the cultural parts with the beautifully conserved shophouses and temples, a pity to miss that, but I got to explore a different part of Georgetown. It's like the old Malayan towns I'm familiar with growing up in one...

The Kimberley St. food scene

When a small space becomes really crowded on weekends and holidays, this sign below says it all...from signs I've come across at private establishments, the business and home owners don't mince their words...NO sales people, NO fund raisers, NO Multi-level Marketing, NO religious preaching...

Below, glutinous rice balls simmering in the open with a gas cylinder next to it - a common sight in Malaysia...quaint!

The rice balls are served with a generous sprinkling of peanut and/or black sesame seeds or both. In SG such rice balls come ready stuffed with peanut or sesame fillings, served in a gingerly liquid or a soupy one with peanuts floating in it. One's dry the other soupy, both eaten as a dessert/sweet snack...same same but different!

The Kuala Sepetang (the former Port Weld) fishing village with its stilted homes and restaurants. The place has become more commercialised, more restaurants have opened up, it's more vibrant, its rural fishing village charm will soon be gone...

There are a good many small family businesses in such sleepy towns waiting to be discovered.. This one makes a beauty powder that's been around for aeons - derived from fermented rice. The rice grains are the broken sort and can't sell for a good price, instead of feeding them all to their domestic chickens, they found a way to produce this powder that cools and soothes the face and body leaving the skin smooth and fair.

The methods are really ancient, totally natural, just soak in water a month till the rice ferments, the yeast produced will do the rest, the fermented dough is passed through a home made metal sieve to produce those little beads, dried in the sun at least 4-5 days and bottled in those glass bottles, looking the same that it has for aeons.

The rice beads dissolve readily when mixed with a few drops of water, is applied to the face like a white mask and washed off once it dries and the facial and body skin tightens...smells like vinegar...

The expensive upmarket equivalent to this humble product is SK II essence derived from the fermentation production of sake!

Go off the beaten track into the lanes, the villages, the boondocks, one discovers the cottage industries still been preserved by families. On this trip I got to see several such family die-hard businesses and I'm truly glad for this opportunity as they may not be around in the foreseeable future. In some societies, life and time can move along languidly like a sluggish stream - changes if any, happen at a very slow pace, in its own time...

During my sketching expeditions that take me into small plantation towns and fishing villages, they are like those sleepy cowboy towns with dusty lanes and stray dogs...!

Mangrove logs arriving by river (a stream rather) to this charcoal processing center where they are slow smoked in those domed kilns to dry out the wood, takes at least 1 to 2 months...the dried logs are then burned in the kiln for up to 2 weeks or longer.

It can take 5-6 days for the logs to carbonize into charcoal after which the kiln is sealed and left to cool for at least 2 weeks. The sealed opening is than broken to remove the charcoal. This was the most interesting stop for me. There are several small charcoal processing centers in the state of Johor but I never had the chance to visit one to see how it's processed. I'm thankful...

Another trade that I'm truly glad to have the chance to check out! Turning the numerous mangrove trees available in this area into charcoal...

The charcoal blocks appear to be of really good quality, solid, heavy. They are gift wrapped to go! Apparently to get such a gift is a blessing for everything that's good and prosperous in business, health - all the rest of it...as so often the case, it's more for business folks...

Another family cottage industry Penang is known for - Nutmeg oil, fresh juice drink, dry fruit, balm for aching muscles...actually, the whole gamut in culinary, medicinal and cosmetic applications...

Nutmeg cordial shaken with soda water produced this concoction - a really refreshing drink. I overdosed on that! The Peranakan restaurant which served it served up a really good meal too, the likes of which I've not come across in Singapore. Kudos!

Drying the whole fruit kernels and sliced pieces after extraction for its oil. The dried fruit with a sprinkling of sugar tastes good, almost 'spicy'

Ipoh is well known for its pomelos, seems to be the only state producing this fruit...just as Penang is the only state producing nutmegs...exclusively. Can it be something in the water or soil or air!

I've been to mushroom farms before but this one has varieties and colours that's quite different, which tells me, they are genetically modified, tampered with in other words.

That deep red staghorn looking fungus is supposed to be rare and found only in the wild. They've managed to cultivate it. The pink and yellow varieties are pretty to look at, I'm always attracted to colours, but I'm not sure now how to approach mushrooms except with caution.

We don't know what we are eating these days.

Even durians. Which may explain why durians have lost their distinctive smell when fully ripen. And why farmed fish and prawns have lost their natural sweetness for they are fed an artificial diet of pellets which would be chemical in origin. Ditto for caged chickens.

Fish and squid left to dry in the sun attract neither flies nor ants which I find peculiar but in the wet markets, there are flies galore...what have the dried products been treated with?

Fungus grow out of organic matter including body tissues. The human body can get fungal infections but not this variety! Be quite a sight to have these growing out of one's ear! As a volunteer in a hospice, I've come across growths that resembled a toadstool sprouting out of a forehead...

My favourite green lung outside Ipoh, in the next big town of Taiping - the Taiping Lake Gardens with its fabulous avenue of old trees. I could never tire of this place. A town that's full of character what with her retro art deco buildings and British colonial buildings - well preserved, solid buildings full of character...

Bazaar lanes and market stalls are the more interesting places I like to get lost in - what caught my eyes here would be the ceiling decor of locally woven baskets.

Another discovery - thanks to the local guide who took us on this culinary adventure. I've long maintained that the better food in Asia is found on the streets where one gets to truly learn about the local people and their food, their way of life.

I'm not a big coffee aficionado but this cuppa was so good I swear they added ganja to it! To get that foam, they 'pulled' the black liquid several times presumably to allow air to get into the liquid, not sure of the scientific part...

...the ice coffee comes in a mug of hot coffee to show you are getting a full mug, you add that coffee into the glass of ice and you're on cloud 9 as you down that...!

The teatime menu - old world old style old charm nostalgia...

Where to find this coffee...

A bridal sedan on display with a chair in it, I rested on that whilst waiting for the rest to show up - a sweet young thing, a staff member, insisted I should have a pic taken. I obliged to make her happy!

The other sedan, a ricksha (rickshaw) was how folks moved around pulled by a coolie...it was a status symbol to be seen around town travelling this way.

There are touristy spots in China, Japan and India, where sturdy young men are employed to pull visitors up slopes to give them an idea of how life was like in the old days. In Indian cities rickshas are a common sight for last-mile transfers where the ricksha wallah pedals on a bicycle dragging the sedan behind him...he dosen't make much...

Beautiful bamboo set

...and wrought iron barber chairs - they don't make them like this anymore...

When the wheels of change turn slowly one holds on to old heritage items and inheritance for a longer period of time and appreciate them more...

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Folks I meet along this journey called Life...

The lovely Susan works at Durbar at FMS (Federated Malay States) took me for a tour one floor up from this restaurant called Durbar. It had really old photos each had a story to tell - this resto goes back to 1906 - very retro, very old world, and the owner is just in his 40s! He seems an enlightened employer, his hires are an older demographic, the wait staff are from a minority race, Malaysian Indians, all fluent in English...even Chinese dialects!

A pair of golden lions for good fengshui

The gracious dining room of the Durbar, housed in a building with character.

History room...

FMS - the Federated Malay States - a federation of 4 protected states of Perak, Pahang, Selangor, Negri Sembilan...long complicated rigmarole which finally led to the formation of Malaysia