Cameron Highlands - a slight retreat

Cameron Highlands was founded as part of the British love for escaping heat. The British, in their infinite wisdom, tended to invade hot countries and then proceed to complain about the heat - and thereby establishing Hill Stations to escape from that very same heat. Thus was Cameron Highlands created. Of course in those far off colonial times, Cameron Highlands was infamous for its cooling climate, insurgent communists and, later, disappearing planters (Jim Thompson). With the advent of global warming those cooling Highlands have simply become Highlands, with a temperature marginally cooler than the green, equatorial, lands below.

    When I had my own Durian orchard, and lived in Perak, I visited Cameron Highlands on a fairly regular basis.   In my ancient Kia Rocsta I would saunter up the winding road from Tapah, careen around the sheer drop bends, drive past indigenous sellers of local wild bee nectar, and sidle towards the home of the festering wound smelling raffelasia plant and that establishment entitled - The Smoke Lodge (established 1937). In those days I had neither the money nor the inclination to sup at the pseudo-Western Smoke House, keen as I was to meld into the background of my adopted country, and wishing to sample not the delights of Brighton or Hove, but rather of Perak and Pahang. Times change and people change. Once in the Cameron Highlands I would buy the odd nicknack, copious amounts of nectar and indulge in a few dozen strawberries - and regret that indulgence on the emetic drive down. Now it was Christmas. My first real Christmas for 7 years, and it was time to indulge in those Western delights.

     Unfortunately I was staying in the insalubrious Dahlia Apartments at Cameron Highlands, which in no way lived up to its floral name. The entire building seemed to suffer from a damp problem and my apartment, upon opening the rickety door with no bolt, smelled musty. Mental warning bells had began to sound when I had noticed the septuagenarian receptionist and piles of discarded furniture littering the building - those bells rang in great abundance on exiting the lift (on the fifth floor) and upon observing a threadbare settee - oozing stuffing. 

I navigated my way along that mould-stained landing and, as I did so, encountered several other seemingly war-torn items of furniture, no doubt casualties from the ongoing tourist skirmishes. The apartment was ample enough, but the mould induced fragrance seemed to permeate everything. Bed sheets, blankets and carpets all smelled of mould. It was all I could do to try to sleep amidst all that dankness.

     I exited that apartment in the damp evening. I left the kitchen tap, with its persistent, and damnably annoying drip, dripping. I bade farewell to the set of tablespoons so thin that Uri Geller could have used them in his spoon bending act, and wished to regain some of that initial excitement I had upon my arrival in Cameron Highlands.

     In a newly born naivety I sought to seek solace in some kind of sumptuous repast, and to hell with the expense. The fact that it was raining was not the fault of The Smoke House, but the misunderstanding regarding the lack of Earl Grey Tea, was. Simply put, Lady Grey Tea is not Earl Grey Tea. Earl Grey Tea is flavoured with the oil of the bergamot plant. Lady Grey Tea - a newly fabricated invention by the Twinnings company, is flavoured with the Mandarin citrus. They are not, repeat not, interchangeable, despite the waitress insisting that they were one and the same - they are not. That was my first disappointment with The Smoke House. Admittedly it was a small matter, but it rather set the scene for the further disappointment.

     Being Christmas time, The Smoke House was bedecked, not with boughs of holly but with a sufficiency of natural greenery, dried flora, mock topiary Bambis, mock blue Delft plates, mocking Tibetan tea pots (which in all reality had never rubbed shoulders with a Yak) and - poinsettias. The latter adding a welcome familiarity to the pseudo-Victorian museum version of Christmas which The Smoke House had chosen the emulate. Gazing upon those red and green poinsettias reminded me of those years in Clacton (On-Sea), when I would hasten to Sainsbury’s emporium of all things middle-class (and slightly exotic) in Colchester, to purchase the elegance of poinsettias to grace my Christmas dinning-table. With my mind firmly back in Malaysia, Pahang and Cameron Highlands, I gazed a little in awe at the mixed metaphors of The Smoke House Christmas presentation. Mixed metaphors and wrangles over tea do not bode well for a forthcoming dinner, especially one as expensive as The Smoke House Christmas dinner.

     Ostensibly, the meal was set to explode like a Malayan Emergency hand-grenade, with all kinds of sumptuous gourmet promise. Turkey was on the menu, accompanied by Cranberry jelly and Bread sauce. I also opted for Cod and Chips - the first time that I had seen Cod on the menu in Malaysia. The food was delivered in an appropriate style, with due deference to serving etiquette, but the portions fell far short of the promises the cost of each item had made. I was crestfallen. The paltry size of each dish, were as if Dicken’s Scrooge himself were eecking out the portions at the back of an impoverished kitchen. There was barely a spoonful of carrots, a minuscule amount of potatoes and hardly four slices of turkey on the overly small Christmas Dinner plate. The Cod was little better, in a strange batter, and the Cauliflower Cheese, I was convinced, was but a child’s portion.  One bread roll, each, was proffered - not, you might notice, a basket of bread rolls and there was no butter knife to use with the meagre yellow curls. This all badly let that eatery down. Overall, the size of the meal was a great disappointment. It was right then, as we tried to savour the few crumbs of food we had been served, that all thoughts of breakfast at The Smoke House the following morning, disappeared. Instead, we had the remains of the Christmas fare I had cooked and we had brought with us, for breakfast.

     Later, a customary drizzle mimicking London rain accompanied a jaunt to the Bharat, Cameron Valley, tea plantation, where meandering rows of tea bushes disappeared their green way into the distance and fresh light green leaves sparkled like lights in the occasional sun. The emporium designed to trap the unwary traveller was not surprisingly called The Tea Room. It boasted of scones (plain and blueberry) apple pie and cream and cheesecake. Liquid refreshments consisted of a variety of teas sold by that company, with the Malaysian sweet Teh Tarik taking preference, for local visitors, over the elusive Earl grey.

     A barrage of wannabe photographers had descended upon the tea room shortly after I arrived. Their subject matter was not the grace and beauty of the plantations rows, but each other and themselves. Cameras with short, long or wide focal distances, ipads, iphones and tablets of all descriptions snapped the ubiquitous Facebook photos, jamming the free WIFI system which slowed to a crawl. Fingers pointed to cheeks, chins rested on hands, men posed manfully with or without cigarettes, children posed with the two finger ‘bunny ears’ salute and elderly relatives looked on a little dazed at all the flash photography directed at their children, grandchildren, nieces and/or nephews. After the obligatory photo sessions, young energised children sped away to play, slightly older children engaged themselves with Facebook or Twitter on their tablets, while older children and adults resumed their love affairs with their smart phones. The wonder of the scenery was all but lost on all

.

     Time must have a stop and, after two nights of mustiness we eventually ambled our way back down those hills and headed back towards Ipoh. Lunch in Ipoh brought a most amazing roasted duck at the Sun Yeong Wai restaurant famous for its roasted duck – and with good reason too.  I travelled on, back to Bukit Mertajam and my temporary home. The following day, an inexpensive Dim Sum repast followed at Huang Zuo in BM and all was well with the world, and that expensive Christmas meal in Cameron Highlands all but forgotten.

Penang Christmas

“Ihachew” “Ihachew” “Ihachew”, those four-year-old’s words still ring in my aging ears. Until this very day I have no idea what I had done for that small child to stand, at three feet nothing tall, purse her cupid bow lips, place her hands on her hips and repeat (ad nauseum) “Ihachew” “Ihachew” “Ihachew” (I hate you). Having done with the verbal barrage, that diminutive critic turned and stomped off up the stairs in the biggest huff she could muster. It was Christmas in Penang or, to be more accurate, it was my first Christmas in Bukit Mertajam (BM) and my first ‘real’ Christmas for nearly seven years.

   BM has become one of those places that people are very happy to escaped from, and even happier to return to on high days and holidays. It has ceased to be a place desirable enough to return to permanently due to ever changing politics and other divisions. Those of us who return to Bukit Mertajam as spouses, or other appendages of loved ones (or attempting to become loved ones), sooner or later have the profound desire to sidle across the bridge into Penang proper, and onto Penang Island. For years I have preferred the antiquated, aging, Butterworth to Penang chain ferry, its jellyfish infested waves and retrospective view of the mainland I was happy to be leaving for all sorts of personal, political and religious reasons. There is something about that grinding and clanking of that limping ferry which strikes me as being vaguely romantic. Perhaps those sounds speak of another era, a happier time when the Malaysian races were more integrated than now, or maybe they just remind me that I am very much a stranger in a strange land, with all the feelings of alienation that entails.

   The enterprise of returning to your spouse’s home is, ostensibly, about going back to family.  As with any Malaysian, or half Malaysian, family there is always, and underline always, the issue of food. Balik Kampung or the return home is just as much about having the comfort foods of home as it is about seeing those family and friends who you have long since left behind - in all senses of the term.

   I was sitting in a petite coffee shop in Bukit Mertajam market. My spouse who was eating, or is that drinking - soup noodles. For some bizarre reason I was thinking of Frank Zappa, Mothers of Invention and all kinds of hip and not so hip, watching Chinese eat long sugarless donuts - Char Kuey, dunking them, Spanish style, into their thick black local coffee, and I was wondering.

   I was wondering just what the hell I was doing there - approximately seven thousand miles from my Colchester homeland, amidst the strangest of strangers and thinking that it is a very long way from there to here, with decades gone, friends gone, heroes gone and just the sound of an old beat reverberating and the twang of a half-remembered guitar cord to keep my few remaining brain cells company. I was reminded that Christmas, and its following New Year, appears to be times of retrospection. Family, friends and past lives all swept through my memory - some partially, few wholly remembered, like some Scrooge nightmare, flash and those images, thoughts and reflections were gone - leaving nothing but the afterglow on my eyelids.

   Brown shoes no longer make it, or do shoes of blue suede - they are far too hot for these equatorial climes. Cheap (Chinese-made) pseudo-rubber flip-flops rule the day. They are slipped on and tripped over, sliding on Bukit Mertajam market discards and debris as I exited that crowded market awash with coffee and some soupy noodle that just could never feel like the breakfasts that I was used to. Where were the croissants? Where the toast and Tiptree Marmalade? Where the Earl Grey tea of my homeland and the Irish butter to spread upon whichever scones, muffins or pastries I should desire. It was a very good question.

    While in Europe, and other more temperate lands, gentlemen of girth were donning red and white suits, mothers were putting out mince pies, sausage rolls and a small glass of something alcoholic; in the Malaysian outback Christmas was being sidelined. The Christmas near idyll was marred by the local market belting out not Christmas carols, and all things seasonal, but the direst of dirges known to modern man. For the entire length of our stay the hastily erected tannoys sprayed us (from 8am to 12 midnight) with Darling Clementine (in Malay), Gangnam Style and songs ranging from the sheer awful to the just plain painful. Christmas was under siege. While I cooked, cleaned and wrangled with chickens and other assorted Christmas fair, my in-laws’ kitchen was besieged by ‘music’ loud enough to drown out the children’s TV viewing, and the Chinese relatives talking – and that is some feat.

    A man is not judged by his roast chicken alone, but by his stuffing, gravy and by his custard. My custard, on that BM Christmas, being the first custard I had made for some considerable time, and taking into consideration that I was tired from the lack of sleep, was lumpy. I made amends by whipping quite innocent cream, covered my sins and my red Chinese wine flavoured trifle too. The meal, when eaten, was accompanied by a quite comfortable red wine and a passable rosé.

    Christmas on the equator – burning heat and monsoonal rain, tends to erode notions of warm log fires, hot toddies and warming toes and hearts around the hearth. The lack of snow, and any form of genuine cold nags like a nightly mosquito; for air conditioning is simply no substitute for chilling snow and leg-breaking frost. I had to keep reminding myself that it was December, and not June or July, time for Christmas pud and not beach barbies. Christmas in Bukit Mertajam was very interesting indeed.

Siem Reap

Siem Reap had changed out of all proportion when I reached there nine months later. The old spreading tree, under which I had eaten so many meals, had disappeared to be replaced with a bank of shops, yet more restaurants and a boulangerie. Tourists had almost completely taken over the town, with puffy pink German, Israeli and British faces and their accompanying tightening shorts on display just about everywhere. Locals had taken refuge from the spreading Mexican restaurants, inside - at the old market, where you could still get authentic Khmer food, coffee and a not unreasonable bargain on a Cambodian made white cotton shirt.

The dusty tuk tuk journey from Siem reap airport, into town, recalled that fateful journey when I had proposed to the woman who, one day later, was to become my wife at the gallery Colors of Cambodia. However, on this newly dusty journey, I noticed that new hotels were sprouting up everywhere along that route into town - like so many dubiously wanted toadstools and were, no doubt, a necessary evil if the town is to continue to grow from the tourist US$.

Siem Reap seems to have lapsed into a reluctant symbiotic relationship with tourism. Tourists need that launch-pad to propel them towards the ancient joys of Ankor Wat, temples and their all too enthusiastic brush with another’s poverty, while Siem Reap is in desperate need of money to develop the town after the atrocities which occurred in Cambodia not too many decades ago – which left the whole country devastated.

Once more I trundled up the steep staircases to my attic studio apartment - above the Colors of Cambodia gallery. I almost literally dropped my camera, in my haste, and placed my tablet on the small wooden table provided, tidied away the red suitcase then immediately sprung downstairs to see what the children had been doing in my absence – wonders it would seem. On the walls were new watercolour and acrylic paintings, while gathered around the tables, inside, were advanced students drawing stunning artworks from photographs. We unpacked the boxes of materials I’d brought from Malaysia, and set about stacking them in the store-room, for use after I had gone. There was a buzz of excitement as I renewed old acquaintances, and then started planning for the following few days of my visit.

Despite its growing tourist trade, the ever present WiFi internet, and the nightly drunks – Siem Reap still holds both a charm and an undeniable peacefulness for me. It remains one of the few places where I can easily write poetry and prose, dance without hindrance and probably make no end of a pratt of myself. Ankor Wat – that grand Wat (monastery temple) mesmerised me on my first visit. It provoked me to write the lengthy poem – Colors of Cambodia, which I have since included in the book – A Story of Colors of Cambodia. Siem Reap/Ankor seems to lull me into a more balmy cultural existence. Maybe it is the centuries of culture layered in that tragic land, maybe it is the sight of oh so many Buddhist temples or maybe there is just something so very amazingly different about Cambodia and, in particular, Siem Reap.

On the last trip to Siem Reap I was in awe. Cambodia seemed very familiar, yet very different at one and the same time. There was a similarity to Thailand, and in particular Chiang Mi, while some of the rural villages reminded me of Perak and Malaysia’s kampongs. Yet there was always that difference, that undeniably Cambodian difference which pronounced itself in the language and in the local food, which was in no way similar to Malaysian food, but bore a slight resemblance to Thai cuisine – especially the salads. Street food seemed to be a disappearing art in Siem Reap but, aside from the fried insects, I could still find the spatchcock chickens and the Chinese influenced Gu Tsai Guay (fried chive cakes), on the rare occasion I was at the Old Market early enough. The wonderfully aromatic Vietnamese coffee still seems to be available – if you know someone who knows where to look – I had the Khmer artist Seney scout some out for me.

Harold Wilson may have said that a week may be a long time in politics, but a week in Siem Reap seems no time at all. I fairly flew around snooping in art galleries, attending exhibition openings, drinking at the Foreign Correspondents Club – which you no longer have to be a foreign correspondent to enjoy, and generally poking my nose into whichever art farty goings on would allow me to. And that was it. Schools visited, Art History lecture done, friends made and I was off again, back to Malaysia with the promise of a slight trip to the Philippines in the New Year.

Battambang

The desiccated rat lying under the restaurant dining table was, probably, not the worse experience of my life, but it was, nevertheless, an eye opener to the northern Cambodian city of Battambang (pronounced battenbong).

   It had been a not unpleasant journey from Siem Reap to Battambang. The sun perpetually glinted into the aged bus. Practically clichéd ladies in straw hats rode by on even older bicycles and mid-aged ladies proffered dried chilli fried insects – with curry leaves, which they held aloft, in rattan baskets, to bus travellers. As we ambled past rural Cambodia on roads evidently not used to speed, rice was being harvested in miles of paddy fields and small tractors, with long trailers, heaved weighty loads of rice sacks along the side of the ever dusty Khmer road.

   The four hour journey (from Siem Reap to Battambang) was laced with intermittent sleep, fields, small villages, the ever-burning bright sun and glimpses of the tastiest baguettes outside of France, or so I was led to believe by one traveller just returned from Paris. Neither the sleepiness of the countryside, the oddness of the cuisine nor the seeming calm everywhere were to prepare me for the under-table deceased rodent, nor for the snub given by a workshop who had forgotten to close their classroom doors.

   It was a time of learning. It was a time when mindfulness was tested to its limits. However, that mindfulness eased me through minor confrontations without my more natural recourse to choice English words and colourful phrases honed and hammered into shape by the wilds of my not-so-dear Essex (land of white ladies shoes and sparkling white handbags – for dancing around). I resisted the call to use that 15^th Century vulgar expletive beginning with ‘F’, or raise my whole bowman’s hand or, indeed, give the one finger salute when one American harpy commanded me and my students to exit from their workshop at Phare Ponleu Selpak. True, and in retrospect, she was only protecting the sanctity of her workshop, but there were no signs to indicate a workshop was taking place, nor their need for privacy. That female had a most rude and offensive manner but, in the fullness of time, we sailed beyond her turbulent maelstrom, past her harpy-clad rocks into the calming waters of that near serene charity art school.

   One day past the harpy and dead rat incident and I was back at Phare Ponleu Selpak, this time giving my own talk about Art History, or rather a truncated version of 150 years of modern Art condensed into two hours. The student crowd could not have been more attentive as they sat cross-legged on the wooden floorboards. Shafts of light coming through wooden walls gave the room a fantasy ambiance, and made it entirely conducive to the sharing of visual delights. It was a little surreal, however, to be talking about Surrealism and having to stop after each sentence so that my translator (himself an artist and one of the founders of the charity Art School) could relay my thoughts. My gesticulations got lost in the translation process. There was I - all full of gusto and wide gestures, and there was my friendly translator calmly wrangling my meaning into Khmer. I have no idea if the travails of Andre Breton or the Gaudi inspired Salvador Dali actually reached those polite and intense students, I hope they did.

   When not being translated, I headed to the San Puoy mountain temple and trundled my way up God knows how many steps, past just as many monkeys and eventually was awarded with a stunning view over the flat fields of Battambang. I was lucky. It was nearing sundown, sun rays highlighted gold covered images of Buddha and aspects of his teachings and the whole ambience was just too celestial. I say too celestial as I had to drag myself away and begin the descent, down those worn steps again - in the failing light. It was then, having survived the mountain steps and being driven to a local (now infamous) Cambodian restaurant, that I was confronted by that ignominious dead rat.