TravelVoice Journal - Memories of Malaysia

Memories of Malaysia

My maternal grandfather was a liar in the heroic mould. He was also an excellent miner. (Both of these traits are quite common in Yorkshire. I am said to much resemble my late grandfather in some ways.) Late in his working career my grandfather was working on a tin dredging site in what was then Malaya.

He wrote letters home on leaves which were pressed and later kept in the family Bible. Strangely, they never became brittle. The letters were written in "jordy" and my mother read them to us with great pride. Of Terengganu, he said that he had discovered a tribe that lived in huts on stilts. Around the doors of the huts were studded immense fortunes in uncut diamonds -- but to remove one was to incur the death wish of the tribe. He remained poor and I remained gob struck. Diamonds. Tribes in huts on stilts. Terengganu. Malaya. The Far East. For a small boy this was, indeed, a heady mixture.

At the beginning of the 1970s I managed to get to "Malaya" for the first time. Love at first sight. As I drove over the causeway into Johor Bahru I smelled the magic of Malaya and I was lost, irretrievably lost. The magic of Malaya entered my blood -- along with several ailments -- which have not left. I am a Malaysian incurable, now hosting a program on Malaysian Airlines out-bound flights from Australia.

While I was there, on that first journey, I followed up the family story that my grandfather was buried in Kuala Terengganu. Despite the fact that an emergency was raging, I was able to get there and do a fairly comprehensive search of the public records. There was no sign of my grandfather. This was not surprising as I was later to discover that grandfather Sinclair died, not in Malaya, but in Yorkshire. Lying until the very end. I last went to Malaysia, as it is now called, two months ago. I came across the border from the Isthmus of Kra, in Thailand, down to Kota Baru. (Sounds romantic but the name means, literally, Newcastle.) The same old magic had me in its spell; the same smells, the same delightful friendliness of the Malays, the same feeling of a pleasant life in a pleasant land. It was, true, like coming home. I sat at a roadside stall and ate a bowl of laksa and started up my rusty bazaar Malay. It was as if I had never left. Later, I crossed over to Taiping, that most elegant of towns, where I had spent two months of my youth. Everything was much the same. The water gardens, if anything, prettier. No-one remembered me. After nearly 30 years this should not have saddened me as it did.

Malaysia, then, is a green and friendly land and what you will read here is totally biased because I love the place as if it were my homeland. Let us, therefore, get the nasty bits out of the way first. Malay drivers are lousy. If you hire a car and drive yourself you are taking your life in your hands. Leave the driving to someone else. Pollution has hit Batu Ferringi in Penang very hard and you are taking a big risk going swimming. Indeed, you will not be swimming, merely going through the motions. That's it. All the bad points covered.

Now for the good news! If you have been only to Singapore you have missed the true feeling of being in Asia. In Malaysia they have not pulled down all the buildings in a mad, lemming pursuit of modernity. In Malaysia, the population is allowed to act in a normal and human manner. Public eructations have not been banned as they have in Singapore. The pace is more relaxed, more tropical, more -- if you like - Somerset Maugham. (Incidentally, that author is still loathed by anyone who knew him in Asia. He took people's hospitality and used their lives as a basis for his stories. In the British High Commission in Brunei his name has been cut out of the visitor's book with a razor blade. Damn right. Fellow was a con man.)

To get Malaysia into perspective you need to understand that the country is a long peninsula divided into two sides very different from each other. On the west coast you have most of the major towns. Start at the tip with Johor Baru and then nip up the coast to Melaka. Take a little tack to the right to take in Kuala Lumpur. Ignore the horror of the casino in the Genting Highlands -- singularly nasty -- then up through the tin-mining town of Ipoh to my lovely Taiping and on to Butterworth.

The island of Penang lies just offshore and is now connected by a bridge. The east coast is my Malaysia. Start again at Johor Baru and up through Mersing along the coast to Kuala Rompin with Tioman Island over there in the middle of that eye-hurting blue sea. On now along a road skirted with white sand beaches and coconut trees and small kampongs full of smiling, laughing children. Up through herating to Kuala Terengganu where my grandfather ought to be buried and along The Beach of Passionate Love (you think I am making this up?) until you come to Kota Baru. There's not a major town on the whole trip. Small towns, relaxed way of life, lovely people, scenery that is balm to the soul.

When you go to Malaysia on a holiday (and let us have no ifs about it) you should plan as follows: Two days in Melaka, two in Kuala Lumpur, two in Penang (but do not swim in the sea) and four or five days toddling up the east coast staying at the excellent hostelries run by the Department of Tourism. Melaka was once known as Malacca and it is the most historic town in Malaysia. St Francis Xavier (according to James Joyce, the only saint to get RSI) worked here as did the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Poms. You can see their influences blending in with the Malay Muslim-style of building and the result is a most pleasant town. All the interesting bits are down near the waterfront. Good for buying antiques which may, quite possibly, be old.

Kuala Lumpur is the capital city of Malaysia but it is still an amiable cove of a town. The railway station is a delight, the government offices elegant and the old Selangor Club, the Dog, still a delightfully anachronistic Tudor building in a green setting. (The fact that I was forcibly evicted from those premises diminishes their charms not one bit.)

Penang has its own charms and is subtly different from the rest of Malaysia. There is one hotel in Georgetown called the E and O which stands for Eastern and Oriental. This is a hotel in the traditional style with bedrooms you could hold a dance in. On the other coast the towns are smaller, the charms discreet, the accommodation clean -- but not luxurious. This matters not. Go there and, beyond doubt, the magical charm of Malaysia will work its wonders.

When you visit Singapore, you should plan to take time out to visit Malacca, which is but a short hop away on the west coast of Malaysia. Malacca -- correctly spelled Melaka in Bahasa Melayu, the official language of Malaysia -- is not as the rest of Malaysia. It is separate, apart, unique. Drive in from Kuala Lumpur and pass the 15th-century grave of the local hero, Sheik Ahmad Majnun. There are three stones, curiously marked, beside the grave. They are known as the spoon, the sword and the rudder. And there is a fourth stone. This has a hole in it. If a liar should put his hand in the hole, he would be held for ever. I am unwilling to test this theory. Malacca started as a fishing village in the fourteenth century with a few fishing huts and, yes, there are still fishing huts there.

In 1405, Admiral Cheng Ho, the 'three jewelled eunuch prince'- no, I am not certain what particular jewels are being referred to -- arrived and brought with him the first of the Chinese settlers who were to become known as the Straits Chinese, sometimes known as nonyas. Cheng spent his time building up Malacca as a trading port and beating off the Thais who saw Malacca as a natural extension of their country.

In 1460, the Princess Hung Li Po, a daughter of the Ming emperor, married Mansur Shah, who was the reigning sultan of Malacca. The princess brought with her 500 handmaidens who settled in, married Malays and added to the numbers of Straits Chinese. The town developed into a sultanate which extended throughout the lower half of the Malay peninsula. In 1509, the Portuguese arrived and tried first negotiation and then, in 1511, brute force to take over Malacca. The excuse given by the Portuguese commander, Alfonso d'Albuquerque, was that the Malaccans had attacked his fleet. The Sultan of Malacca did a runner to Johore Bahru, just across the causeway from Singapore, where he re-established himself. The Portuguese settled in and were there for more than a hundred years, during which time Malacca became a major trading port for Asia.

Tome Pires wrote in The Suma Oriental in 1512: 'Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.' Some traces of the Portuguese period in Malacca's history can be seen in the architecture and in the people. During the Portuguese occupancy, St Francis Xavier came as a missionary and the fort, A'Famosa, was built.

In 1641, the Dutch took over after an eight-month siege of the city. They carried out an extensive rebuilding program. You can still see the Stadthuys, the town hall, which is pink and probably the oldest Dutch building in Asia, and the Dutch Christ Church, but the Dutch had already moved the centre of power to what was then called Batavia and is now called Jakarta, and Malacca's day in the sun as a trading port was already over.

In 1795, the British started to take over and this became formalised in 1824. They remained in residence until Malacca became independent along with the rest of the Malaysian nation. Getting around Malacca is easy. This is a small town and everything is within walking distance. Worth seeing are the Porta de Santiago (which is all that is left of the A'Famosa fort), the Melaka National Museum (which is in a 17th-century Dutch house) and the Cheng Hoon Teng temple -- the oldest Chinese temple in Malaysia. One of the great attractions of Malacca is shopping for antiques. Lots of stalls around Jalan Gelanggang, which on my first trip was called Jonkers Street. Two items to look for are nonya ware -- ceramics specially made in Guangzhou province for the Straits Chinese -- and miniature cannons, which were used, on occasion, as currency. A few years ago, on a visit there, I bought a Pathe horn gramophone, in working order with wax cylinders, for $S14 because the proprietor had no idea what it was, what it did or whether it worked. It now has pride of place in my music room. The only eating place worth considering is Glutton's Corner on the waterfront at Jalan Taman, just across from the Porta de Santiago. At night, there are rows of stalls and you can pig out for a miserly amount.

Malaysia is one of the world's most wonderful destinations when you know where to look. The people, the climate, the scenary and the smells are a part of what so many destinations have lost through westernisation. Please trust my experience, after all, I am not my grandfather.

February 1999

Oh Savannah

Trevor Sinclair
June 2003

By Trevor Sinclair

My oh so patient partner and I arrived in Savannah after an extremely tedious drive from Atlanta. Trucks, eighteen-wheelers, trucks, trucks and more trucks. If I�d known more I would have flown. With ticket prices under $50 it�s gotta be worth it. The drive along the Interstate is very lush green and somewhat pretty, but it�s not as though there�s anywhere to stop, apart from finding the most wonderful fresh fruit in the small town of Dudley�somewhere off the freeway past Macon.

Memories of Malaysia

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